


Mother of Gods

by ixieko



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Discussion of Abortion, F/M, Human Experimentation, Nightmares, Suicide Attempt, Weird Biology
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-11
Updated: 2017-04-27
Packaged: 2018-03-11 22:33:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 59,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3335243
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ixieko/pseuds/ixieko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What it is like to be pregnant with a non-human child, a scientifically created hybrid of human and an entity of unclear origin and unknown features? Lucrecia Crescent found out that it was not pleasant. Not pleasant at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Her periods were late by a week, and she was too busy to notice it earlier.  
When Lucrecia understood that, she didn't even believe herself at first. And her initial thought was not the most obvious one, but, rather, "Did Jenova's cells somehow affect me, or is this the effect of Mako poisoning?" She always used all possible protection while working, but, still...  
Only a few moments later she got to the obvious, but unbelievable option. Unbelievable, because for _that_ she always used protection too.

...Positive.  
She looked at the result of pregnancy test, disbelieving. "What am I supposed to do with _this_?" She thought. Kids were not in her plans at least for the next several years. She didn't want to become a mother yet, she wasn't ready for that, why did it have to happen now, when she finally had a chance to become a scientist she always wanted to be? Why did it have to happen when she was working on so important project, when they were so close to success?  
"It's unfair," She thought, looking at the blurry "plus" sign. "I didn't ask for this, why did it happen?"  
Iffie just left for Cosmo Canyon on a few days leave, and she didn't even have someone to complain to.

"You are distracted today," Hojo said later that day, when they were analyzing just another tissue sample from just another volunteer.  
"Of course I am!" She exclaimed, throwing her pen down with enough strength for it to bounce and fall from the table. "I'm pregnant!"  
"Are you sure?" He asked, frowning at her.  
"Yes!" She banged her fist on the table. "I don't even know how could it have happened!"  
He snorted.  
"And now I'll have to have an abortion," She groaned, ignoring him. "I'll lose at least a week on the road alone!"  
Hojo stood up from his chair and walked a circle around the lab, looking at the floor and thinking about something. Lucrecia sat, hugging herself and staring, unseeing, at her unfinished notes. She didn't really want to have an abortion, but to have a baby now... It would be detrimental to her career. She could not professionally survive this after her fiasco with the research of Chaos. And she definitely was not ready to sacrifice her whole future for the sake of a fetus she didn't even want to conceive.

Finally, Hojo stopped beside Lucrecia's workstation. "This is exactly what we need," He said, smiling faintly, triumphantly at her.  
"What?" She asked snappishly, glancing at him sidelong through her bangs.  
"Your pregnancy." He clarified. "How far along are you?"  
"I... Uh... A month and a week since the last periods."  
He nodded to himself. "Excellent! We have plenty of time to prepare everything."  
"What are you talking about?" She demanded.  
"Project S. We need a volunteer, and you're the best choice. Whatever Nyx would say now, Gast will _have_ to approve the project, he doesn't have a reason not to."  
"Oh." She contemplated his words for a moment. This would allow her to stay on project without any interruptions, and she would be a better volunteer than any outsider. And, if Hojo's predictions were true - and they were, she was _sure_ , - in the end they would receive a human with super-human abilities, and it would be their own child, so they wouldn't have any problems getting approval from the parents for further experimentations. Yes, it _was_ the perfect solution.  
"So, will you marry me?" He asked, interrupting her thoughts.  
"Yes!" Lucrecia, laughing, jumped up from her chair and threw her arms around him. "Yes, I will!"

Only later, when they settled for the night, and her husband-to-be was already asleep, she suddenly understood what she missed.  
The fetus she was pregnant with could be not Simon's, but Vincent's. The term allowed either of two to be the father.  
"How do I manage to end up in situations like this," She mused, burrowing her face into the pillow to muffle her half-laughs, half-sobs, "What to do now? Tell him?"  
She thought a bit more, and decided to just drop it. It didn't actually matter whose genetic material made up this fetus, Jenova's cells would work just as well in either case. It didn't matter for the Project who was the father, and it shouldn't matter for her and Simon as well.

They both were scientists, after all.

...

Their wedding was a simple affair that took about five minutes to complete. They exchanged simple wedding bands bought in the shop nearby, and a middle-aged clerk in Nibelheim Civil Registration bureau signed their marriage certificate, congratulated them and wished them happiness together, and that was that, they were married.  
"I thought I would feel... happier," Lucrecia admitted when they went out of the building, heading back to the Mansion.  
The day was hot, and, for once, they were not wearing their lab coats. Her white sleeveless dress with blue flower pattern, though pretty, was not an actual wedding dress, and all that happened seemed unreal, as if they only played husband and wife.  
Simon frowned at her.  
"I mean," She continued, playing with her wedding band and not meeting his eyes, "I wanted it, but... It's just... I always imagined my wedding... bigger. Party, guests and all that. Nevermind, I'm just... nervous, I think."  
She guessed it was a stupid complaint, and something Simon will likely never understand. He was not very fond of big gatherings anyway, and she suspected that for him, marriage was just means to an end. She wondered, if the legendary scientific couples had similar differences, - Martin and Irina Novak, who formulated the theory of natural selection and evolution of species, or James and Victoria Wilkins, discoverers of the structure of the DNA. She had a crush on Hojo since her second or third year in the University, and always admired his way of thinking and his determination, but, maybe, marrying him was not such a great idea, after all.  
"He didn't even say if he loves me," She thought.  
"You ran away from the man who did," Her inner voice reminded, sounding too much like Iffie.  
"I didn't have a right to date him," She argued with herself, "It was my fault his father died."  
"You should have thought about it _before_ you slept with him."  
She shook her head, trying to get rid of the voice. Thinking of former lover was definitely not something one should do on wedding day, as nondescript as it was. It was more than enough that said lover was shadowing them on their way through the town, a fact which she tried very hard to ignore.

When they entered the Mansion grounds, Simon looked at her and said, "If you want a celebration, we can organise it."  
"You would?" She asked, immediately cheering up.  
"Of course," He answered. "If you want it, I'm willing to do it."  
Lucrecia laughed and hugged him. "After Iffie's return, then."

Completing their project proposal and getting it approved took much more time that the wedding, but in the end, Professor Faremis, as Hojo predicted, had no more valid reasons to delay it, and finally they could begin their work. The sun had already set, and the shortest night of the year 1979 was beginning, when Lucrecia at last found the time to go out and smoke. She took her cigarettes and a lighter, but Simon stopped her.  
"You have to quit smoking," He said. "Any excessive harmful substance can be detrimental for the fetus."  
She looked at the pack longingly, but put it back into the drawer. He had a point.  
"Okay," She said, "I quit."

She went out of the basement and down to the lobby. Gast was sitting on the sofa, reading through their proposal, it seemed, for the umpteenth time. She smiled at him and went out of the building.  
The sky was already dark, filled with cold sharp dots of stars. She leaned on the balustrade, looking at the stars and thinking of everything that happened that day.  
"We are beginning the project," She thought. "That... That means I'll be a mother. I'll have a child."  
She imagined how this child will look. His eyes will be brown, and hair, most likely, black. Or... Why "he"? It could be a girl. She imagined a small girl with curly hair and brown eyes and smiled, almost feeling the child in her arms.  
She touched her lower abdomen lightly. It was absolutely flat, she didn't even feel herself pregnant yet, although earlier that day they did a scan and it showed the tiny fetus, alive and developing. How will it feel, she wondered, when her belly will be big and round, housing her child. The thought of someone else living inside her body was somewhat unnerving.

"Lucrecia," A voice sounded from behind her.  
She whipped around, alarmed. "Oh... Vincent. Um... Hello."  
He went out of the shadows, stopping a few steps away from her.  
"You married Doctor Hojo." He said.  
"Yes," She answered, frowning. "Do you have any objections?"  
"Did you... Did you really want it?" He asked softly. "If he is forcing you in some way... Just tell me. I'm here to protect you."  
She laughed, shaking her head. "Vincent, are you serious? No, no, of course I wasn't forced or anything. I married him because I wanted to."  
"I... I see," He said. "I apologize for intervention on matters that are not of my business, then."  
"It's nothing," She smiled. "Thank you for your concern."

When she returned to the Mansion, Professor was still sitting at the same spot as before. She wondered, if he was going to stay there all night.  
"Lucrecia," He said, noticing her. "Please, come here."  
She went to him. He sighed, looking at the papers in his hands, and asked, "Do you fully understand what Project S entails?"  
"Yes," She answered. "I think, I do."  
"This is a very dangerous experimentation on your own child," He said. "It could lead to birth defects - mutations, malformations, any kind of them. It could very well be dangerous to your own health and your life. The benefits it could bring are purely theoretical, but the dangers are very much real. Are you truly willing to risk?"  
 _It's like with Chaos_ , she thought. _It's all the same again_. "Your project is dangerous, your theory is ridiculous, why don't you give up and quit it." But she didn't quit then, and wasn't going to do it now.  
"Yes." She answered. "I am."

...

The next day brought unexpected news. Professor Gast Faremis and Doctor Ifalna Nyx were leaving for some backwater place called Woodlands, to the Temple of Ancients. Lucrecia was in the basement, analyzing data on one of the failed experiments, - the volunteer, who was infused with Type-2 cells and subjected to Mako treatment, first showed signs of developing schizophrenia, and then committed suicide, - when Hojo came in and told her.  
Abandoning her work, she ran up the long stair and through corridor to Ifalna's room.

The room was in disarray. There was a travel bag on the bed, surrounded by piles of clothing, books and various kinds of little things - statuettes, jewelry, souvenirs from all the places she visited. Lucrecia remembered some of them - this small wooden heron, for example, stood on Iffie's shelf in their room back at the University.  
"Iffie?" She called, looking around. "Are you really leaving tomorrow with Professor Faremis?"  
Ifalna turned, pushing locks of her hair from her forehead. "Yes. He is going to explore the Temple of Ancients, and I'll assist him."  
Lucrecia was at loss. She stood silently, trying to think of something to say, of some way to prevent her friend from leaving.  
"I think," Ifalna said a while later, "You're making the greatest mistake in your life by agreeing to the experiment."  
 _"Oh, not you, too,"_ Lucrecia thought. She wondered, if Simon was the only one who understood her.  
"A _mistake_? Iffie, it's my chance to participate in something important! To make a difference! To give a new hope to all humankind!" She shook her head in exasperation. "How could this be a mistake?"  
Ifalna looked away to the window, to bright snowy mountain peaks. "The thing we are experimenting with is not a Cetra, Lucy."  
 _Yes, this all was like with Chaos, again,_ she thought.  
"How can you say that?" She asked. "Did you yourself not agree that all evidence pointed it was a non-human anthropoid organism that lived on our planet around two thousand years ago. It should be a Cetra, what else could it be? Are you abandoning the project," She would not say _abandoning me_ , because it would be... too whiny, she supposed, "Because of mere... unfounded doubts?"  
Ifalna sighed. "True, I don't yet know what it is, nor do I have any proofs. But I'm sure it's not what we thought it was. I can't tell you everything, because I have first to understand it myself." She stepped closer, looked right into Lucrecia's eyes. "Lucy, please. Delay the experiment. Wait until we return. It won't take too long."  
Lucrecia briefly considered this option. The infusion of Type-2 cells had to be done by the end of the first trimester of pregnancy. If Iffie would not return by then... Well, abortion it is. She unexpectedly found herself reluctant to even think about it. She didn't want an _abortion_. She wanted her child, her precious _Ancient_ who will lead humanity to the new golden age.  
She asked, how long would the expedition take, if six weeks would be enough.  
"I don't think so," Ifalna answered. "But, Lucy, do you have to do it with your first child? You can always wait until another pregnancy. Please, wait for our return."  
Lucrecia turned away, her eyes filling with angry tears. So, there was nothing more to discuss, Ifalna had already made up her mind and was not going to change it. The thought of staying with only Simon and Vincent for company, between her husband's obsession with the project, Turk's unwelcome protectiveness and their mutual dislike was... uncomfortable at best. But there was no choice.  
"When you return," She muttered, "We will prove that you were mistaken. My child will be a true Cetra. We will not fail." Not again.  
Ifalna tried to stop her, but she was already walking away, without a glance back.

...

She didn't go out of the lab to say good-byes to Professor and Ifalna when they were leaving. There was too much work to do, and she was too angry with Iffie to be anywhere near her for now. She wondered, if they will return before the child will be born.

This pregnancy was going to be very long.

...

The first weeks after Gast left passed without any significant events. Lucrecia suffered a brief period of morning sickness, and surprised herself with her new preferences in food, but otherwise everything was fine. Scans of the fetus showed that it was developing normally and the results of her own blood analyses were also normal. Her stomach was as flat as before, but her favourite jeans were already too tight.  
In the absence of half their team, the Mansion became even more quiet and empty than it was before. Well, at least now she and her husband could have sex right at their work place, Lucrecia thought one day, chuckling at her own thoughts. Vincent never came down to the basement unless he was summoned, and they could do anything they wanted to.

Hot, but short mountain summer was coming to an end; the trees in the garden were already turning golden and red, and nights were getting colder with each passing day.

On the first day of August Lucrecia was walking to the common room where Simon was waiting for her. They wanted to discuss the last details of upcoming infusion that was planned on the second week of the month. Entering the room, she heard Vincent's voice, asking if she was to take part in the experiment.  
She sighed inwardly. These past weeks the Turk kept to himself, maintaining professional distance and being polite to both scientists, and she foolishly hoped that the peace would last longer.  
"It's true," She said, coming closer to the table where her husband was sitting.  
Vincent looked at her, his mouth hanging open. She wondered, if he, again, thought that Simon was somehow forcing her. Did he really think she was unable to make her own decisions? Did he think she didn't have any ambitions, any curiosity, any skills to do anything by herself!? Did he think she was just pretty face and curvy body!? Oh, she was so angry with him!  
"Why are you so surprised?" She asked.  
"But..." He hesitated, "Using your own child for an experiment?.."  
"Ha!" Hojo said, interrupting him, "I don't know what you're _implying_ , but both of us are scientists. We know what we are doing. You are the last person to have any word in this. Now leave us at once, _boy_!"  
Lucrecia felt both relieved and guilty. Simon was, probably, too harsh, but, maybe, it would be enough for Vincent to get the message.  
"But..." Vincent began, and Lucrecia snapped. As if it was not enough that he considered her weak and dependent, now he dared to judge her morality? "I'm sorry, Professor Grim," She thought, "But I'm ready to slap him now!"  
"But what?" She said, scowling and ignoring his hurt expression. "If you have something to say, say it!"  
"Are you..." He stepped closer to the table, trying to look into her eyes, while she stubbornly looked away from him, "Are you sure this is what you really want?"  
"Am I sure? Am I _sure_!?" She exclaimed. "If this only concerns me, then yes, I am sure!"

She waited for him to say something - anything else, but he just mumbled a few words and went away.

Lucrecia sighed, sitting down beside Simon. This confrontation made her question her choices. What if their theory was wrong? What if they made mistake in their calculations? What would become of her child? No, she told herself firmly. She would not doubt her husband's work. It was more than enough that everyone else did.

A few days later, she was walking through the garden, stretching her legs after day's work, when Vincent approached her.  
"Lucrecia," He said. "I'm sorry if my concern is offending you, but..."  
She sighed, crossing her arms and looking at him, her head tilted to the side. He hesitated, but then continued, "If Doctor Hojo is somehow forcing you... Just tell me. I will help you."  
"I don't want," She said as coldly as she could, wincing as her guilt resurfaced - _He loves you, he wishes only good for you, what are you doing to him?_ \- "Nor need your protection, _mr. Valentine_. I'm perfectly capable of dealing with my life on my own. Please, don't interfere in my line or work or in my family. Am I clear?"  
He took a step back, his expression changing first into a grimace of pain, and then into emotionless mask. "Yes, ms. Crescent. I apologize."

She turned on the spot and walked away, barely keeping herself from running. "I'm sorry," She repeated in her head, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry." She wasn't even sure, whom she was apologizing to, Vincent or his father. In the mansion, she ran up the stairs and to the left, to Iffie's room, and collapsed in the corner, crying silently. "I had to do it," She thought, trying to calm herself down. "He cannot continue to intervene like this. He would get in trouble. And I really, really, _really_ don't need his protection."  
She looked up, feeling that she was not alone in the room, and glimpsed a tall, dark, translucent figure of Professor Valentine beside the window, looking at her with sad expression. She blinked, and it was gone.

After that, Vincent didn't try to talk to her anymore. Their interactions were brief and professional, and she was thankful for that.  
She wondered, why wouldn't he transfer to another mission. She would, in his place. She wondered, if he still loved her.

...

The day of infusion came at last, on the second week of August. Lucrecia was nervous, but tried to hide her anxiety. All her doubts returned with vengeance. Lying on the cold table in the basement lab and looking up at her distorted reflections in surgical lamp, she wondered if she made the right choice. If not for Simon beside her, she would jumped off the table and ran away, but she reminded herself: "It's what we both wanted, how can I let him down now?" - and stayed put.

A long needle pierced her lower abdomen, reaching for the small fetus that lived inside her; her husband controlled its movements using both ultra-sound and medical Scan. She was anesthetized and did not feel any pain, only an uncomfortable pull. The operation ended in a few minutes, followed by an injection of modified Mako solution. Now, they had to wait several days and observe the effects that Type-2 cells and Mako had on the fetus.

Simon helped her to climb from the table and guided her to bed. It was still daytime, but she felt strangely tired, probably from all the nervous tension she went through these last days. After the infusion happened, she felt much better.  
She'd like to call Iffie and tell her that all went fine, but Professor Gast's expedition was already somewhere in wilderness, and until they set up a transmitter, there was no way to contact them.

A week later, fetus was still alive and developing, although its heart rate increased above normal for a human fetus. It was a good sign, Jenova's cells were working. They did scans and blood analysis daily, and were spending most of the time down in the basement lab, returning up only to eat and to sleep.  
Ever since the day of infusion, Lucrecia slept badly. Every last one of her dreams ended in fire. It could begin as any normal dream, but in the end, everything around her was on fire, and she was running away, desperately trying to find a way out of the flames, only to discover that all the world was burning. She blamed it on her slightly increased body temperature, a side effect of Mako injections. Unfortunately, the injections were mandatory, without them the project would not succeed, and she had to put up with her bad dreams. Simon said that in time, when her body will adapt to Mako, her sleep will, most likely, improve. She hoped he was right.

...

Lucrecia was sitting in her old room, reading by the window, when she saw from the corner of her eye some movement outside. She looked out and saw a cloaked figure walking towards the Mansion entrance. As if feeling her gaze, the stranger stopped, raised her head and looked straight at Lucrecia.  
It was a woman with very pale skin and long silver hair. Her eyes were purple and glowing, and when she smirked at Lucrecia, her mouth was full of white sharp teeth, more like shark's than human's. Lucrecia recoiled from the window, and in that moment the woman raised both her hands, and flames sprang from her, lighting grass, and trees, and buildings on fire. Lucrecia ran to the door, but the corridor was already burning. She turned back, but from the flames outside the woman with glowing purple eyes was looking at her, clawing at the window. Lucrecia covered her head with her hands, ran into the burning corridor...  
...And sat up in the bed, panting.  
The room was dark and silent, except for Simon's quiet breath. It was just another nightmare.  
She climbed out of the bed and tiptoed to the window. Outside, it was a dead of night, and everything was peaceful. No flames, and definitely no women with purple eyes.  
Well, the woman was something new. Up until that dream, the most scary thing in her nightmares was fire.  
A month passed after the infusion, but her sleep seemed to change only to the worse.

She returned to bed, and her husband, woken up by her movements, asked in sleepy voice, "Another dream?"  
"Yes," She sighed, rubbing her eyes. "Something new today, a woman-shark with glowing eyes... It's getting worse, Simon. Maybe we could find some kind of sleeping pills suitable for me? I'm... tired of not sleeping normally."  
"I don't think you should take any pills," He answered. "We can't predict how the fetus will react to medicaments, therefore we should avoid them at all costs."  
She sighed again.  
"Dreams are just dreams," He continued. "Images created by your own subconscious. I don't see the reason for you to be so afraid of them. Try to sleep now."  
With that, he turned on his side and several moments later was asleep.  
Lucrecia closed her eyes, but could not calm down enough to sleep. Only when the sky outside was already getting brighter, she finally fell asleep, only to wake up less than an hour later, after another nightmare.

...

In the middle of September, they finally received a communication from Professor Faremis.  
Lucrecia later blamed it on her loneliness and lack of normal sleep, but after sending a report on the progress of Project S, she sent a private message to Ifalna: "I see fire."  
Immediately after, she felt stupid for doing that. What could she explain via telegraph anyway? She needed someone right here, beside her. Someone who could understand her, someone with whom she could talk about things that scared her. Iffie was right kind of person, but she was half a world away from her, and it could not be changed in the foreseeable future. That's why, when she received a question, "Where?", she answered with simple "Dreams."

Her pregnancy went as it should. By October, she could hardly fit into any of her pants anymore.  
Her reaction to Mako was the same as from the very beginning, and the situation with nightmares continued to worsen. Now, she saw the "shark-woman" almost every night, although in these dreams Lucrecia was always in the Mansion, and the woman was outside, trying to get inside through the window or through the door, but nightmares always ended before she could do that. Lucrecia wondered, what the woman represented, which dark side of her subconscious was manifesting in that form.

When awake, she sometimes felt a strange pull from somewhere to the North; she took a compass and checked the direction several times. It always was directly to the North. She told Simon about it, and he, of course, was fascinated.  
"An ability to feel planet's magnetic field?" He mused. "It would explain why Cetra didn't need mechanical aids to orient themselves."  
"But, why I'm feeling it?" She asked. "I'm not infused with Jenova's cells, am I?"  
"You are," He said, "Project G showed that Jenova's cells can pass through placental barrier, though not in significant amounts. You are exposed, just not on a very large scale."

That, again, made her question her choice. Probably, she should have listened to Gast, and Ifalna, and Vincent. Probably, she didn't really understand what she was getting herself into. But now, she thought, it was already too late to turn back. The only road left was forward, and she was already halfway there anyway.


	2. Chapter 2

The baby was small and chubby, with brown eyes and a tuft of soft brown hair on the top of his head. From the waist down he was covered with white knitted blanket. Lucrecia leaned over the crib, looking at the child closely, and reached out to touch him on his chest, clad in light blue overall. How come she already gave birth to her baby and didn't even remember it? The baby sucked at his fingers, frowning at her. Lucrecia wasn't very familiar with children, but this one didn't look like a newborn. Probably several months old, she thought. She remembered that the production of the pigment - melanin - began when a child was born, and only by sixth month there should be enough of it to change the eye colour from grey to brown.  
"No less than half a year, then," She thought. "Where have I been all that time? Did I have a severe reaction to Mako?"  
A knock on the door interrupted her thoughts. She glanced around and only then understood that she was in the lobby. She straightened up, frowning in confusion, - she was sure they've been in one of the upper rooms only a second ago, - and saw Vincent and Simon standing beside her. Both of them were looking at the baby, one with a smile and the other with a frown.  
"Not quite what I expected," Her husband commented. "But it will do."  
The knock repeated. Simon looked at the door. "I'll open."  
"No, don't," She tried to say, but it came out as a soundless whisper. "No!" She tried again, and again couldn't make her voice loud enough. She wasn't sure, why she was so terrified, but she felt that they shouldn't let whoever it was inside.  
"Don't be afraid," Her husband said, smiling and opening the door.  
Outside, a woman stood, tall and pale, in long black robe. Her purple eyes searched the room and stopped at the crib. She took a step forward, her silver hair flopping like with the wind, though the air was completely still.  
"No!" Lucrecia whispered, picking the baby up and covering him with her arms, "Go away! Don't touch him!"  
"Why?" Simon asked, tilting his head. "Isn't this what we both wanted, Lucy?"  
"No, it's not!" She said, taking a step back, her voice at last gaining strength. "Vincent, help me! Close the door!"  
The Turk shrugged. "You demanded that I mind my own business," He said, "I can't interfere in your project anymore."  
"Anyway, it's too late now," Simon added. "The door was opened a long time ago."  
The woman slowly moved forward, and all around her flames started on the floor, and walls, and furniture. Lucrecia turned and ran to the stair, trying to get the child away from the monster. At the top she looked back. Both Vincent and Simon were standing in the fire, flames dancing in their hair and all over their bodies.  
"Go back here!" Simon called out to her, smiling widely, happily, flames coming out of his mouth alongside with words. "You have nowhere to go!"  
She turned away and ran to the upper floor, but from the dark corridor someone stepped in front of her, barring the passage.  
"Why are you always running away?" The familiar voice of Grimoire Valentine said disapprovingly, and she saw his face - pale, with empty eye sockets, filled with swirling darkness of Chaos. "You have to accept your fate, Lucrecia."  
"No, no, no!" She shouted, clutching the baby to her chest, and recoiled from him, but instead of wooden stair her foot meet only air. She began to fall backwards...  
...And felt soft linens under her back and hands. She was in her bed.

The afternoon was grey and gloomy, raindrops were streaming down the windows, blurring the sight of bare trees and grey overcast sky. The clock on the bedside table showed 4:16.  
"Only half an hour," Lucrecia sighed. "Can't I sleep thirty minutes without a nightmare?"  
During the last two weeks, she began to take mid-day naps, trying to get as much sleep as she could. At first it worked, and for several days she felt better, but not for long. Soon, her daily naps were, too, filled with nightmares.  
She berated herself again for letting her own subconscious scare her so much, but, as always, it didn't help.  
"Probably, I should go to town's first-aid post and ask for some sleeping pills, after all," She thought. Simon would be displeased, but she was too tired to be concerned about his reaction.  
She looked out of the window, to the rain-soaked garden, and sighed. The weather was certainly not good for a walk.

That evening, Lucrecia was sitting in the lab and composing a weekly report for Professor Faremis, when something in the paper caught her attention. Numbers, the dosage of Mako solution she was receiving daily during the past week. Two thousand eight hundred. She rubbed her temple, trying to make her sleep-deprived brain work and figure out what was wrong.  
She still was trying to determine the source of her worry, when she felt someone touch her belly. She leaned back in her chair, looked down. No one there, but the touch persisted, feather-light and uncertain.  
"It's the fetus!" She understood after a moment. "It moved... The baby moved!"  
She smiled, remembering the child from her dream, and suddenly felt so sad she almost cried.  
"What if something happened to me?" She thought. "Will Simon be able to take care of the child? Or will he be too immersed in his projects to be a father?"  
Lucrecia looked at her husband, who was sitting at his workstation, reading through the new reports on volunteers from the past phases of the Jenova Project and making notes. She knew that most of the volunteers were doing fine, except for a few that apparently had latent mental illnesses prior to participating in the experiment.  
As far as she knew, both of Hollander's subjects - personally, she barely knew only Gillian, - did not experience any kind of complications. Although, probably, he was hiding something, just like she and Hojo were. They did not report her problems to Gast, out of fear that he will order the project cancellation.  
Simon noticed her gaze and looked at her.  
"The baby just moved," She said, smiling at him.  
He shrugged, returning to his work. "It's as expected at this stage of pregnancy," He said.  
She deflated, looking at her papers and feeling terribly sad again. She wished there was someone to talk to about things like this. Her fears, her pregnancy, her feelings... Probably, she could send another message to Iffie.  
"And what would I tell her?" She thought. "Complain that my husband isn't as excited with my pregnancy as I'd want him to be? She would say that Hojo is being a typical Hojo, and it would be totally true."

 _Two thousand eight hundred_. Two thousand. Eight hundred. It just didn't want to go out of her head. What could that mean? She opened the last week's journal and looked at the numbers again.  
"Something is wrong with the dosage," She thought, frowning at numbers, and pulled the treatment plan out of her desk drawer. She checked it, and yes, the dosage was much higher than it should be. She checked the journal, and found that the doses began to deviate from planned values around three weeks ago, and the additional amount of Mako was steadily rising.  
"Simon," She asked, unsure if she got the numbers right, "Did you write the Mako dosage wrong?"  
"I don't think so," He answered.  
"Why, then, is it 1200 milligrams higher than it should be?"  
"The fetus is responding to Mako better than we predicted," He explained, still busy with his own work. "That's why I increased the dosage. Why are you asking?"  
She stared at him, uncertain if he really said what she just heard. "You didn't tell me," She managed at last.  
He continued to write.  
"Simon," She said, "I... I'm not some lab rat, I'm a human being! You should ask me first!"  
At last, he looked at her, raising his eyebrows. "You already gave your consent," He said, "Before we started the project. Why do you think I should ask again?"  
She huffed in exasperation and stood up. "Simon, I have a right to know what's happening to me and why. My reaction to Mako wasn't good even before you increased the dosage, and you knew it!"  
"I thought you were interested in project's outcome," He said. "I..."  
"I am interested," She interrupted, "But I'm also concerned about my health, both physical and mental. I knew there were risks, and I was willing to take them, but not to multiply them by randomly changing the treatment like this!"  
Hojo, too, rose from his seat. "Your health is not in danger. All your analyses and measurements are normal."  
"But I can't sleep because of nightmares, and after the change in dosage they've become much worse!"  
"Are you telling me," He hissed, "That you are ready to give up because of your childish fears?!"  
"No, I'm not!" She exclaimed, leaning forward and slapping her palms on the table. "I'm ready to continue, but we have to stick to our original treatment plan!"  
For several seconds, they stared at each other over their tables. At last, Hojo looked away, shrugged and said, "Fine."

The next hour passed in uneasy silence. When she put her papers away and went to the exit, Simon asked her, "Will you report our disagreement to Professor Gast?"  
She looked at him, surprised that he would think that. "No, of course not."  
The only sign that Hojo heard her was a slight nod.  
"It would be really embarrassing", She thought, climbing the stairs, "To fail the project because of bad dreams and small misunderstandings."

Later, after she sent a weekly report to Professor Faremis, Simon met her in the common room downstairs.  
"Lucy, I'm sorry," He said, "Sometimes I just... get carried away and forget that I work with humans."  
She smiled at him, taking his hands in hers. "It's okay," She said. "We worked it out, did we?"

...

With the amount of Mako in her system decreased, Lucrecia was able to sleep better, at least through the day. Nightmares still haunted her dreams, but, thankfully, mostly in nighttime. A couple of days later, when the weather improved and unending rain was replaced by cold wind and occasional snow, she went to the first-aid post and got sleeping pills that were considered safe for fetus. She didn't intend to use them often, just sometimes, when she was in desperate need of sleep. The pills didn't prevent nightmares, but, at least, she didn't remember them after waking up, and could go back to sleep immediately.

October was unusually cold that year; by the end of month, small streams were already frozen, and snow covered the ground. The old house was not a most warm place, but Lucrecia found that she was not feeling cold. The combination of Jenova's cells and Mako warmed her up better than any furnace. The baby now moved more often, and she often imagined holding him in her arms. Her own appearance was changing - her eyes, once brown, now had a circle of bright blue around the pupils, and the color of irises was changing too. It was a known effect of Mako on humans, but previously it was an indicator of severe poisoning, and now, with the help of Jenova's cells, it was only a sign that the treatment worked. She wondered, if baby's eyes will be Mako blue from birth.

...

"This is perfect!"  
Hojo moved away from the eyepiece, allowing Lucrecia to peek in. She looked and saw what he was talking about. The tissue sample consisted of normal human cells and evenly spread Type-2 cells. She sat back and shuddered, suddenly feeling cold for the first time in months. It wasn't some tissue from a woman dead for 2000 years, or a sample from unknown volunteer, it was her own body they took this sample from. Her own body now contained these cells.  
Simon continued to speak; she tried to concentrate on his words.  
"Do you see how evenly the Type-2 cells are spread throughout the tissue? It must be because of the place where the source of cells is situated," He gestured at her abdomen. "The uterus has large blood vessels, and these vessels can carry the cells from it to all organs and tissues."  
She shuddered again, imagining that her heart and her brain, too, contained Jenova's cells. She supposed that freaking out over it was as childish as to be afraid of nightmares, but could not stop it.

"What is the proportion of Type-2 cells in fetus, how do you think?" She asked Simon, trying to distract herself.  
He smirked. "Well, I suppose, by the time of birth they will be at least 50%."  
"But," She hesitated for a moment, "Will he even be able to survive? Jenova's cells don't function without Mako."  
"Yes, it's safe to assume that it will need a constant Mako supply for its organism to function properly."  
"Maybe Professor Gast will find something in the Temple of Ancients," She mused. "Something about how the Cetra themselves solved their Mako-addiction issues."  
"This kind of knowledge would be very useful," Simon said distractedly, writing down his findings. Lucrecia, finally, mustered enough courage to look at the sample again, when she felt Simon lean over her back and whisper something unintelligible in her ear.  
"What?" She asked, raising her head. Simon looked at her questioningly from his seat a meter away.  
"Did you say something just now?" She asked.  
"No," He said.  
"I heard someone's voice," She confessed. "Someone whispered into my ear."  
He looked at her sceptically. "And what did they say?"  
"I don't know," She said. "It was too quiet."  
"I think, you should go get some rest," He remarked, returning to his notes. "Try to sleep, I'll finish the work here."

Instead of going to bed, Lucrecia decided to go out. The sky was clear, but the wind was chilly and sharp. She was glad, because the cold air cleared her mind and chased away the headache. Walking along the lanes, she felt almost like her old self, and for the first time since Iffie's departure, she really believed that everything will be alright.  
Valentine, as always, silently followed her, but didn't come closer.

After the brightness of a sunny day, the lobby was too dark, and she stopped for a moment to let her eyes adjust. Lucrecia blinked several times, her head spinning a little, and just began to walk towards the stairs, when she heard the sound of the door opening behind her. She suddenly was scared, so scared that she could not think. Flames were starting on the floor around her. Shaking all over, she took a couple of steps to the stairs, but her legs gave way, and she fell down. Through the haze of panic, she heard someone walking to her, and tried to crawl away. A face appeared in her field of vision, but it was not what she expected, not a pale face of the shark-woman. It was Vincent.  
"Lucrecia? Lucrecia? Do you hear me?" He was repeating, trying to lift her.  
"Help," She whispered, "Help me... Close the door..."  
He glanced at it. "It's closed."  
She wrapped her arms around his neck, clinging to him and casting fearful glances around. Fire has disappeared. The door was closed. There was no shark-women in the lobby. Still, Lucrecia was shaking and breathing in fast, short gasps. She felt like it was not enough oxygen in the air.  
"Doctor Hojo!" Valentine called. "Please, help. She collapsed."  
She turned her head and saw her husband looking at them with a frown. "Bring her to the sofa," He said after a beat, turned around and hastily went to the room on the right.  
Somehow Vincent managed to get her to the sofa, but she still didn't release him. She could feel the scratchy fabric of his coat under her palms and hear his breathing, and it assured her that this was reality and not another nightmare. She was not ready to let go of him.  
Simon returned a minute later, bringing a first aid kit with him. Together, two men managed to persuade Lucrecia to release Vincent, and Simon gave her a shot. The drug acted almost immediately, clouding her mind with a thick fog of apathy. She felt tired and sleepy, and barely registered how Vincent carried her to the room. By the time they put her to bed, she was asleep.

The next morning, Lucrecia woke up an hour before the alarm rang, feeling well rested and refreshed. The drug Simon gave her let her sleep all night without interruptions. She smiled at her sleeping husband and kissed him, and chuckled quietly when in response he grimaced and grumbled something.  
Entering the lab, she heard a sound of paper rustling from the study. Alarmed, she tiptoed to the door and looked inside. At the table, Vincent was sitting, reading through one of the reports.  
"What are you doing here?" She asked.  
He started and turned to her. "Lucrecia. Good morning."  
"You are not supposed to read these." She said.  
He put the papers aside and stood up. "Do you know that Doctor Hojo was hiding your condition from Professor Faremis?"  
"Of course," She answered. "These reports were written by me."  
He frowned. "By you? But why? Don't you realize how dangerous it is to hide you symptoms?"  
"Yes, I'm aware," She said, hoping that she sounded more sincere than she felt. "I didn't hide anything from Simon. We know what we are doing."  
"No, I don't think so," He began. "I've read the reports on volunteers..."  
"I've read them too," She interrupted. "This is a risk I'm willing to take."  
"But why didn't you inform..."  
"Because I want the project to succeed," She said quietly. "This is my only chance. I cannot afford to fail."  
"I understand," His voice was just as quiet as hers. "But isn't Professor Faremis more qualified..."  
"No, you _don't_ understand," Lucrecia said. "Please, Vincent... Don't interfere. You wouldn't do me anything good by doing this. Simon isn't forcing me, I'm doing only what I, myself, want to do."  
He glanced away, and she mentally prepared to argue again, but after a moment he closed his mouth and looked at her with startled expression, as if he just realized something, and then his face gained the same closed-off look as when she pushed him away. He nodded silently and went past her to the door and out of the lab.  
Lucrecia leaned on the wall, feeling extremely exhausted. The baby was moving inside her belly, apparently disturbed by her emotions. "This is only for fifteen more weeks," She reminded herself. "Or, probably, eleven. Thirty-six weeks will be more than enough."  
Even eleven weeks sounded way too long.

...

For several days, everything was fine. The weather, at last, improved, and the days were sunny, but Lucrecia didn't go out of the Mansion anymore, not wanting to repeat the experience she had had after returning from her previous walk. If staying indoors for fifteen weeks meant that she could avoid another panic, then she was ready to sit inside the house.  
Vincent was as quiet and distant as before, but time and again she caught his glances. She wondered, if he was going to try to talk to her once more.

...

The last scan showed that fetus' development has significantly slowed in the past week. Lucrecia and Simon discussed it and came to the conclusion that decrease in Mako dosage was the reason. They decided to slowly adjust the dosage until the fetus would develop at normal speed. As much as Lucrecia disliked the idea of increasing the dosage again, there was nothing else to do. They had to provide the necessary amount of Mako, if they wanted the baby alive.

After lunch Lucrecia, as always, went to take a nap. She tossed and turned for some time, and almost fell asleep, when she heard someone's unfamiliar voice from outside the room. She got up and went to the door.  
"Even if she will resist us, we will still have him," The voice said. The sound of it was strange - more like a chorus, as if several people were simultaneously saying the same phrase. "He will make a good weapon."  
She went out, following the voice. Now it was a barely audible whisper. It led her to the upper study, Gast's old room. Beside the wall a wooden crib stood, and leaning over it was a woman in long black dress.  
"Who are you?" Lucrecia asked.  
The woman turned around, grinned at her, showing sharp white teeth, her purple eyes shining. In her arms she held a small sleeping baby, wrapped in white knitted blanket. "I am his mother," She answered in the same chorus-like voice.  
Lucrecia looked at the baby, recognizing him, and took a step forward. "No, you're wrong! It's my child!"  
"Are you sure?" The woman asked, and pinched baby's cheek. The child winced and opened his eyes, purple, with slit-like pupils. "See, he is mine. I will be the only mother he will ever know."  
Lucrecia couldn't tear her eyes from the baby. She was sure he was hers, why then?..  
The dream abruptly ended, interrupted by alarm clock ringing, and Lucrecia found herself laying in her bed. She sat up, rubbing at her eyes and recalling the dream. "What could it mean?" She thought. "Am I afraid that my child will be taken away? And who could that woman be? A personification of Shin-Ra?"  
Yes, she sometimes was worried, thinking about the future. What if the Company decides that the baby is better kept away from her? But, seriously... She shook her head.

She was finishing dressing, when a sharp, loud sound made her jump. It came from the direction of basement lab entrance. She ran, her heart pounding, out of the room, through the corridor and down the stairs. Hurrying along the underground tunnel, she heard laughter.  
The door to the lab was thrown widely open. On the ground, a human's body was laying face down in a pool of blood. A few steps away, Simon stood, laughing his brains out. There was a handgun in his hand. Lucrecia eyed the body warily and turned to Simon. "Was there an assault?" She asked. "Where's Vincent?"  
She supposed, he was pursuing remaining attackers, whoever they were. But something about the body... The body. She looked at it again. The suit...  
"Is this... Vincent?!"  
Simon was still laughing madly, clutching his gun.  
"What happened here?" She asked. "What have you..."  
"Lu...crecia..." Vincent moaned and went still. She took a step towards him and dropped to her knees. He was not breathing.  
"Vincent..." She whispered, tears streaming down her cheeks.  
Hojo, finally restoring the ability to speak, began to babble about specimens and experiments, but she couldn't grasp the meaning of his words.  
"Vincent is dead," She thought. "Just like his father. It's all my fault. If only I was stronger..."  
Her belly ached. She rubbed it, willing her abdominal muscles to relax. She knew the proper procedure she needed to follow now. Inform their superiors and headquarters. Wait for clean-up crew to arrive. Write reports.  
They both were likely to be put under arrest. Their project will be discontinued. She will lose her baby. Even if she will be found not guilty, it will be a huge luck for her to find any job better than a research assistant in some backwater lab.  
And Vincent will stay dead, no matter what she did.  
The baby might be his. She had to do something, to save at least the child.  
She wiped the tears off her cheeks and looked up at Hojo. He was silent now, leaning against the table and staring at Vincent's body. His face was frozen, expressionless. She stood up, wincing at the pain in her abdomen.  
"I'll not report your..." _Your crime._ "This _situation_ ," She said. "For the sake of my child."  
He turned his empty gaze to Lucrecia. She doubted he saw her. She didn't think he understood a word she was saying.  
She turned away and slowly went back upstairs, to Ifalna's old room, lay down on her friend's bed, curled into a ball and cried until she fell asleep.

...

"What happened to Valentine?" Iffie sent her the next day.

They reported Vincent's death as an accident with lab equipment. It was less likely to draw unwanted attention than anything else. Lucrecia didn't return to the basement since previous day, and moved her belongings back to her old room. Hojo, on the other hand, spent the night and most part of the day in the lab. They barely talked, although he didn't seem very upset. Actually, he looked even pleased, especially after they composed the report. Immediately after she sent it, he went back down.

She stared at the piece of paper with decoded Iffie's message. What could she answer? She felt tears sliding down her cheeks again.  
Several minutes later, Lucrecia sent back the only bit of truth she could reveal now.  
"My fault."


	3. Chapter 3

"...makes me question whether the Cetra themselves viewed Materia as some kind of complicated devices, whether they were inclined to use them as often and as eager as we do now. Their views on the Planet and the Lifestream allows to assume that it is..."  
Lucrecia turned the page, and, not looking at the plate, stabbed another piece of cutlet with her fork and put it into her mouth, trying not to grimace. Lately, all food smelled and tasted like ash and mould. She almost never was hungry anymore, and fed herself only for the sake of the baby. Reading while eating was not the healthiest habit, but it distracted her enough to be able to eat.  
She glanced at the plate. More than a half of her portion was still there.  
"The baby doesn't need much food," She told herself, pushing the plate away. "Women got pregnant and gave birth even during famines. I'll lose some weight, what of it? I can't make myself eat more anyway."  
When she put her half-full plate on the kitchen table, Suzy, a middle-aged woman from Nibelheim who came to Mansion three times a week to cook and to clean rooms on the first floor, asked, "No appetite?"  
Lucrecia nodded.  
"It happens," The woman said with a kind smile. "Pregnancy messes with your head. When I was carrying my first child, I couldn't eat anything except for eggs and cucumbers. Can't stand their smell since then."  
In answer, Lucrecia smiled, not daring to open her mouth; she was too busy trying to keep the food inside. Even water, though tasted better than tea or coffee, reeked of mould. She wondered if there was something wrong with water pipes in the town.

Upstairs, she climbed on her bed and sat with her back supported by pillows, pulled sheets over her legs and thighs and continued reading of dr. Valentine's notes. He left behind a notebook and a box with several different rare Materia samples and a few samples of Mako from the Crystal Cave. She took all this with her to Nibelheim, but never had a chance to study it, too busy with - and too interested in - Jenova Project. Now the notes were a pleasant break from it.  
Lucrecia turned the page, but couldn't read anymore. The letters blurred before her eyes.  
From the very beginning of the experiment, she found herself less and less invested in the Project, though still willing to go through with it. She planned to talk to Professor Gast as soon as he returned, to voice her opinion about keeping the experiment as safe for the child as it was possible. After all that happened, she could not trust Simon as completely as she did before.

A faint growl from the direction of the basement door distracted her from her thoughts. The whole past week Simon was holed up in the labs, staying there even through nights; sometimes she heard sounds form there, weakened with distance, and supposed that he was experimenting on some unfortunate monster from one of the sealed basement rooms. When Jenova Project team first settled in the Mansion, Gast and Hojo inspected these rooms, careful to not break seals that kept monsters inside. One of the rooms they couldn't get in: it was locked from inside, and the door was too sturdy.

Her eyes returned to the small neat letters of Grimoire's handwriting, so similar to and so different from Vincent's, and she pulled the notebook to her chest, pressing it hard to her breast and closing her eyes.

...

The Mansion was silent and empty. Lucrecia went, looking into every room, searching for someone - anyone, but there were only echoes of voices dancing around the empty rooms. Sometimes the familiar voices sounded clear and loud from behind a door, but when she opened it, no one was there, and voices fell silent.  
She followed one of the faint whispers up the stairs and to the left, to the upper study. The voice was trying to tell her something important, she knew, but she couldn't understand the words.  
The door was open. Vincent stood inside, his back to the door, leafing through some papers on the table.  
"What are you doing?" She asked, frowning. "How are you even here? You should be..." She trailed off, straining her memory in an effort to remember why exactly he couldn't be there.  
"You can still stop it," He said in a quiet voice. "You still have time and strength."  
"Stop what?" She asked. "What are you doing here, Vincent?"  
"Stop the monster," He said. "Stop it, while you still can."  
"I don't understand." She took a step closer.  
"Don't come near," He whispered, "or it will notice." A moment later he said, "Too late."  
She reached out for him and touched the fabric of his dark blue jacket. It was wet under her palm. She pulled back, examined her hand. It was smeared with something red and sticky. On Vincent's back, a large dark stain appeared, and it was growing bigger, black and glistening under dim overhead lights.  
"Is this... Is this blood, Vincent?" She asked, horrified. "What happened? Did someone wound you?"  
"Don't you remember, Lucrecia?" He asked in answer, his voice now sounding cold and bitter. "It was you." He slowly turned, and she saw that his eye sockets were empty and leaking blood, and his face was white, lifeless. His shirt and jacket were soaked in blood. His grey lips moved. "You killed me, just like you killed my father."  
"No," She whispered, stepping back. "No, I didn't!"  
"Why then are you holding it in your hand?"  
"What am I..." She lifted her hand and saw that it was holding a handgun. Vincent's handgun.  
"Vincent, it wasn't me! I would never..! Vincent, please!" She looked at him pleadingly and let go of the gun. It clattered to the stone floor.  
His mouth stretched in wide smile, as if someone took it by corners and pulled. "Accept it, my love," He said. "You are a murderer. Just like me, just like Simon. We all are _monsters_."  
"No, no, no," She cried, clutching at her head and moving back until her back hit the stone wall, and then she slid down to the floor, sobbing. "It's not true, it can't be true! I didn't shoot you!"  
"There's nothing to be upset about, Lucrecia," He whispered, and his soft voice somehow surrounded her, sounding from all directions at once, echoing from the walls. "Killing is only natural for the likes of us."  
She cried harder, covering her ears, but his words reached her all the same. "My love, don't struggle." He was saying, his voice now warm and soothing. "Accept it, Lucrecia; you are a monster. You have _always_ been a monster."  
Blurred by tears, the basement around her slowly began to shift, and she became aware that she was lying on her side in her bed, still hugging Grimoire's notebook.

"A dream," She thought, wiping the tears off her cheeks. "Only a dream, I didn't really shoot him. I'd remember if I did, wouldn't I?"  
She hugged the notebook tighter, as the tears started again; before, she tried so hard to not admit how much she missed Vincent. How much she missed them both, Simon and Vincent, and the days when it all was simpler and easier.  
"I still love him," She thought. "I love a dead man whose death is my fault, and his murderer. How sick is it?"

The first chords of piano sounded from the quiet, empty corridor. In the stillness and silence of the deserted Mansion, the tune seemed especially sad. She listened to it for several minutes, gathering her wits. Their silent ignoring of each other could not continue any longer; they had to talk, they had to somehow find a common ground. They still had to work together.

She went to the bathroom first and washed the traces of tears off her face. In the mirror, her face looked thinner and paler, and almost-blue eyes seemed wrong on it, as if she was changing, transforming into someone else. She shivered and closed her eyes, took a deep breath and turned away from the stranger in the mirror.  
Following the music, she went down into the big hall. Simon playing the piano was certainly an uncommon occurrence these days. She didn't hear him play since the experiment began. It was the first time he went out of the lab to do anything aside of checking on her since the day... Since Vincent's death.  
Lucrecia entered the room, wondering if she will ever be able to forgive him. If she will be able one day to look at Simon and not see a murderer. If she will ever forgive herself...

As light as her steps were, Simon, apparently, heard them, because he stopped playing, but didn't turn to look at her. She stopped a few steps away, unsure of how to begin. The tense silence stretched, and, finally, Simon was the first to break it.  
"He threatened to put an end to the Project S," He said. His voice was very quiet. "Mentioned some kind of connections he had with the upper management." Lucrecia nodded silently, though he couldn't see her gesture. She guessed Vincent had to do something like that, judging by the outcome.  
After a beat, Simon continued. "I had to protect the experiment. To protect the... the fetus. Sephiroth."  
"I..." Lucrecia began, "What? Sephiroth?"  
"The name for the fetus, if it will survive." Simon said. "By the rules of naming, it should start with an S."  
"But, why Sephiroth? Is it even a human name?"  
Simon looked at her, a faint smile playing on his lips. "He will not be an ordinary human, Lucy. Why should we insult him with an ordinary name?"  
"But, but..." Lucrecia stuttered.  
"He will be one of a kind, one above all human beings. He will be _perfect_ ," Simon said, and his eyes were very bright, almost feverish. "He deserves a special name."  
"He will be a child," She said quietly. "Before all that, he will be a _child_. Won't other children mock him for his name?"  
"They won't dare," He answered simply.  
Lucrecia shook her head. Simon's choice of a name bothered her, but it wasn't the most important question for now. They had months before the child will be born; they will have enough time to discuss it later.  
She came closer to him, leaned against the side of the piano. Simon glances up at her.  
"I..." She sighed. "I don't think I will be able to remain your wife after... After all this."  
Simon nodded silently, accepting it with no attempt to argue.  
"But we still have to work together," She continued.  
"You are willing to continue the experiment."  
She shrugged. "I guess we don't have many options here. If we stop, be it now or after the child will be born, he will die. But we will have to discuss the next stages with Gast. I don't want to take undue risks, not with the child."  
"This experiment is a risk in itself." Simon rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Whatever course we choose, there's always a possibility that the specimen... the child will not survive."  
"I know that," She said impatiently, "Believe me, I know. But with more minds to think of the problem, there will be less chance for a mistake. Am I wrong?"  
"You are right, it will be safer. However, it can result in a failure of another kind."  
She frowned at him. He explained, "If we are too cautious, the... child will be not much different from an ordinary human."  
"Oh." She said. "I see. But still, it will be better than his death."  
Simon looked like he would disagree with that, but after a moment looked away and said, "Very well, we will discuss this with Gast after his return."

And that was that. They returned to their working relationship, although both were still wary and overly polite around each other.  
After Lucrecia confessed that she wasn't comfortable going to the basement lab, Simon offered to move the equipment they needed to the upper study. He even seemed somewhat relieved by that, as if he was afraid that she will have some kind of a breakdown if she was forced to go there.  
While they were setting up their new lab, Lucrecia thought about asking him to bring Grimoire's box too, but decided against it. Their peace was still new and fragile, and she didn't want to shatter it. Mentioning Vincent's father would certainly do nothing good.  
"We have to work together," She reminded herself. "We have to, for the sake of the child."

...

With the second trimester of her pregnancy nearing its end, Lucrecia and Simon conducted a thorough examination of her and fetus' health. The results were not very good on her part; her trouble with eating led to her losing weight instead of gaining it, and her blood biochemistry became unbalanced. It didn't have much impact on the child yet, but if the situation continued, he would suffer too. Her kidneys, fortunately, were faring well under the double pressure of pregnancy and Mako.  
Simon analyzed the development of the fetus in the past months and recalculated Mako dosages for the next weeks. Medical Scan showed that the baby was developing normally, and confirmed that it was a boy.

Preparing for the first Mako injection after the examination, Lucrecia couldn't help but feel scared. After each of previous increases in dosage, her nightmares worsened, and there was no reason to assume that this time would be any different. But this time she wouldn't have even a sleeping Simon to be near her through nights.  
Not that his presence now would make any difference, though; if anything, it would be even worse to be beside him, a constant reminder of what happened.

But in the days that followed the dreams didn't change in a slightest, staying the same as they were since the day Vincent died. There were no fire and no shark-woman anymore; instead, she was wandering alone in the empty Mansion that seemed far larger than it really was, a labyrinth of corridors stretched infinitely, with numerous closed doors and no exit. Whispers of ghostly voices surrounded her, trying to tell her something, or mocking her, or not paying her any attention. Waking up from these dreams, she always had a feeling she missed something, something important.  
"Probably, my subconscious finally calmed down, now that Vincent died," She thought bitterly. "Probably, I considered him a threat without even realizing it, and now that he is gone... My nightmares are gone too."

Simon didn't visit the underground lab anymore; whatever experiment he was conducting there, it seemed to be finished.

...

"...It seems that Gast's analysis of legends proved correct. He found his Cetra. Could this mean that the legends concerning Chaos and Omega were also true? Probably, other Weapons as well." Oh the side, there was a small note, "Ask B. what he has on W."  
Lucrecia put the notebook on the bedside table and stretched. The clock showed past midnight; it was time to go to sleep.

"Weapons," She thought, opening the door to the bathroom. "Where did I hear about weapons lately?"  
And then she remembered. "He will make a good weapon." That was what shark-woman told about her child. Could it be..?  
Sudden dizziness made her grip the doorframe. A maelstrom of images and sounds surrounded her, and in a moment she was lost in it.

 _"Weapon," The voices whisper._  
_A huge creature sleeps deep under the ice, an order to attack never arriving to wake it up._ Cautious, we have to be cautious...  
_The world is slowly withering away, filling with monsters._  
_A small boy examines a new needle mark on his arm. His white hair obscure his face. "Professor..."_  
_Three blades meet mid-air, setting sun shines above. The sky turns black, and the sun turns into an enormous red... moon?_  
_"...was Jenova. She died shortly..."_  
_A baby cries in a transparent plastic crib._  
_"...two blacksmiths lived in the foothills of the Red Mountains..." A small yellow-haired boy listens intently, his mouth slightly open, to an old man telling the story._  
_The hammer strikes. The sparks fly. The sword is being born from the darkness._  
_Darkness gives way to fire. The world is burning._  
_The baby cries._  
_Fire blooms in the night; a burning city. A dark figure dashes through darkness and fire, leaving behind a trail of dead bodies._  
_"Sephiroth!"_  
_The sword. The baby. The creature._  
_The hammer strikes. Darkness, ice and fire mixing together, creating a whirlwind. A green whirlwind over a mountain range..._  
_"...died..."_  
_"...of the goddess..."_  
_"Mother."_

Lucrecia came to, lying on the floor just inside the bathroom. Her head was still spinning.  
"What was that?" She thought. "A... hallucination?"  
She tried to get up, but could only sit with her back to the wall. She was shaking all over, and her body felt wrong, refusing to obey her. Her muscles ached.  
"I have to tell Simon," She thought. "It's getting too bad. We have to lessen the dosage."

Some time later, she managed to stand up and get to her bed. The sleep came instantly, as soon as her head touched the pillow. She wasn't in the least surprised to see familiar walls of the Mansion. The voices whispered around.  
"Do you hear me?" She tried. "Somebody hear me?"  
Nothing changed.  
She went down the corridor that stretched far longer than the real second-floor corridor. Moving past the stars that led down, she heard a strangely familiar voice, saying, "...not you mother." She froze, listening to it. It sounded like Iffie. Was she back from the Temple already?  
"Where my mommy?" A thin child's voice asked, and a man's voice - Simon's? - answered, "Her name was Jenova. She died after you were born."  
"What?!" Lucrecia exclaimed, running down the stars and to the room from which the voices sounded. "It's not true! Simon! Why..?"  
She threw the door open, but there was no one inside.  
"You're looking in the wrong place," A voice came from behind her. She turned around. The hall was empty.  
"Where should I look, then?" She asked the silence.  
A shadow shifted in the dark shade of the stair, moved to the part of hall that was better lit. Lucrecia saw that it was Vincent. His head was hung low, face obscured by shadows and his own dark hair.  
"The answer lies below the ground," He said in whisper. "Go down and you will see the truth."  
"What truth? What are you talking about? I don't understand!"  
She stepped closer to him, but he recoiled, hissing, "Don't come near me!"  
"Why?" She asked, confused and hurt. "Are you alright?"  
Something changed in his posture; before, he seemed ill or wounded, swaying slightly on his feet, with his head bowed and his arms hanging limply, but now he straightened up and looked at her, smirking.  
"Why, of course I'm alright, my love," He said, taking a step forward. "As alright as a dead man can be."  
She took a step back. He followed. "Don't you want to kiss me?" His pale grey lips asked. Lucrecia silently shook her head, taking another step back, and then turned around and ran into the room. Vincent went after her. She ran around the piano and found herself in a trap, in a corner from where there was no exit.  
"What do you want from me!?" She asked the monster that was slowly approaching her.  
A purple light briefly flickered in his dark eye sockets. "Only to kiss you, my love." He answered.  
"I don't want to kiss you! Go away!" Lucrecia shouted.  
Vincent stopped, tilting his head to the side. "Or... what?"  
Lucrecia looked around for some kind of a weapon. There was a small round stool, she thought she could pick it up and throw at the monster, but it was unlikely to stop it. Her gaze returned to the piano, and she suddenly saw Vincent's handgun laying on its top. She snatched it and aimed at the monster. "Go away, or I'll shoot you!"  
Vincent smirked and continued to walk to her. She backed off until her back met the wall. "Stop, Vincent! I'm not joking!" She said, keeping her aim on his chest. Her hands trembled. The monster began to walk around the piano.  
"Vincent, please!" She begged, to no effect.  
When there were only a few steps between them, she pulled the trigger.  
With a loud "bang!" the gun fired. For a brief moment Lucrecia felt a surge of excitement, a sense of freedom so full that it filled her entire being. She felt as if she was able to fly, as if wings were ready to spread from her back... And then Vincent stopped, looked down with confusion written in his features.  
"You killed me," He said, sounding surprised and disbelieving, touching his chest and looking at his hand. "Lucrecia, why..."  
He swayed and fell face forward. She only managed to jump to the side to avoid him, and stood, frozen, looking as his body twitched a couple of times and went still, and a pool of blood slowly spread out from under it.  
"What have I done," She thought, terrified. The gun slipped from her hand and fell to the floor, making her jump at the sound, and then she dropped to her knees beside Vincent's body.  
"I'm sorry," She whispered, crying and trying to shake him awake, "I didn't want this, Vincent, please, wake up, I'm sorry..."

She now was crying loudly, sobbing and clinging to the body in her arms. The... warm body?  
"Wake up," Someone's voice was repeating somewhere over her head, "Wake up, you're having a nightmare." Someone's hand was stroking her back.  
She clung tighter, breathing in the scent. She didn't kill anyone, he was alive, he... "Vincent," She whispered, "I thought I killed you. I was so scared..."  
The hand stopped. Lucrecia looked up. Instead of Vincent, she saw Simon's face.  
"Oh," She said, embarrassed. "I'm sorry."  
She lifted her right hand, looked at it. She still felt a phantom weight of the gun, but her hand was empty. She looked at Simon again. He still was holding her.  
"Is Vincent dead?" She asked. Simon frowned at her and didn't say anything. She explained, "I dreamt that I shot him. Did it really happen? Did I... Did I kill him?"  
"No," He said calmly. "I shot him. You weren't present."  
She hugged him, hiding her face on his shoulder. "Thank you," She whispered.  
"For... what exactly?" He asked.  
"For being here with me. I'm not feeling good, Simon," She confessed. "These dreams feel so real, and earlier today I had a hallucination... I'm afraid I'm losing my mind."  
"Probably we should lower the dosage of Mako," Simon suggested. "I'll look what can be done."  
"Thank you," Lucrecia said.

After that terrifying dream, Lucrecia began to take sleeping pills again. She was sure the nightmares continued, but she didn't remember much of them, and it completely suited her. Sometimes she remembered bits and pieces, - the endless corridors filled with whispers, the empty rooms, - but not much more. She didn't know if she had any nightmares about Vincent.  
What she was sure she never saw in these dreams was an underground lab, the place she avoided in the real world.

...

Turning the last page of Grimoire's notebook, Lucrecia sighed. She had to somehow muster courage to go down into the basement to get the box, if she wanted to continue his research. All the important notes, alongside with the Materia, were there.  
She looked out of the window to the cold, black-and-grey world outside. Strong wind was blowing, bending shrubs and trees, and heavy clouds poured cold water on the bare ground. Simon was crossing the yard, heading somewhere in the direction of the town. She wondered how Iffie and Gast were doing in their tropical forest.  
"I heard Iffie's voice in that nightmare," She remembered. "And Simon's, and... was it my son? Was it a vision of the future? But why there was no me in there, and why would anyone say that Jenova was his mother?"  
She shook her head. Visions of the future were illogical, because the future didn't exist yet. Everyone with half a working brain knew that. The nightmares were just nightmares, her mind losing contact with reality under the constant influence of Mako. That was it, and that was _all of it_.

She put the notebook on her table and stood up. "Enough of slacking," She thought. "Time to put my mind to use. If it will have something to do, probably it will stop making up stupid scary images."  
With that, she left her room and went to the basement.

Stepping into the lab, she looked around cautiously, not willing to see any remains of Simon's experimentations on monsters, but the surgical table was empty and clean. All of the glass tanks were empty too, except for one, filled with green liquid. A dark shape was visible inside, - the monster on which Simon worked, she assumed. Lucrecia spared it a brief glance and stumbled. The body inside didn't resemble an animal or monster. It was a human. She slowly came nearer, looked up, trying to see it better. The body was male, naked and unmoving. On its chest there was a thick scar that looked almost black through the green of Mako. Short black hair floated in thick pale green substance, framing the pale face. The eyes were closed.  
"Vincent?" She whispered. Her eyes darted again to his chest, to the scar there. "Is... Is this a dream?"  
She touched the glass. It was cold and solid, but it didn't mean anything. But if this was real... "Simon experimented... on Vincent." She thought. "Is he still alive?"  
She ran to the controls, looked at the monitors. The heart monitor showed something strange - a heartbeat of a kind, but very faint, irregular, clearly not normal for a human. The encephalograph showed activity too. The body temperature was too low. She ran a med-Scan, and it showed that the tissue of Vincent's body was decaying. The last of his life force was slowly leaving his body. Soon he will be really, irreversibly dead.  
Lucrecia turned and ran to her work table, crouched beside it, supporting her belly with her left hand and pulling the box from under the table with her right. One of Gast's rare Materia was, as he believed, able to forcefully tie spirit to a body and such to prolong a dying body's life. She needed time to think what to do.

She opened the box and gasped in shock. Several of the small compartments were empty; the Materia she needed wasn't there. She took a quick inventory of missing pieces; a soul-binding Materia, an incomplete Summon Materia found near the Crystal Cave, a Materia that was believed to be a variant of Manipulate... Doctor Valentine's notes were also absent, along with three out of five samples of tainted Mako. She straightened up, looked around. The notes were lying on Simon's table. She uttered a wordless scream of fury. How dared he experiment on Vincent? How dared he use Vincent's father's research for it!?  
She went to Simon's table and picked up the notes. If Simon already used the Materia on Vincent, she didn't have much time. She had to figure out how to restore Vincent's vitality, and she had to do it quick. His spirit was still bound to his body, the activity on encephalograph screen proved it, but for how long no one could say.  
Lucrecia sat at her table, opened the first notebook and began to scan it for useful information.

Ghostly flames danced on the periphery of her vision, but she paid them no attention. She had a work to do, and she couldn't allow herself any distractions. Flames or not flames... She concentrated on the notes and threw everything else out of her head.


	4. Chapter 4

The time of day wasn't easy to determine in the lab that was hidden in the basement of the old Mansion; be it day or night, there always was light, a quiet hum of computers, a rustle of paper or clinking of glass and metal, - as long as someone was working there.  
Lucrecia sat back in her chair, her gaze tracing the weathered stones of the wall up to the ceiling in contemplation. On the table in front of her several thick notebooks lied open. Deep in thought, she absent-mindedly stroked the lined paper with her pointer finger. Her other hand rested on top of her belly; the baby was restless, probably due to his mother's stress, and kicked at her palm, sometimes calming for several minutes and beginning anew.  
"What did you try to do, Simon?" Lucrecia whispered, staring through the jagged stones. "The parts in the notes you commented on... It all seem connected, but how exactly? I think it reminds me of something... I saw something similar before, but when and where?.. If only I could remember..."

The fetus pressed his head against her pubis and stretched, digging his heels into her stomach and liver. Wincing, she shifted, trying to find a more comfortable position. "Hush, baby," She told him, rubbing her belly. "I know you're tired; me too, but your mom still have work to do. Wait a little longer, soon we'll go to bed."  
The clock on her table showed 3am. She spent more than six hours down in the lab with no food or water. No wonder that the baby was urging her to stop this madness and get something to eat. She didn't feel hunger or thirst, but that didn't mean the child felt the same.

A sound interrupted her musings. She froze, listening to it, first thinking that it was Simon, but... It sounded like steps of bare feet on the stone. Tiny bare feet. From a corner of her eye, she glimpsed a small white silhouette. A... child? She whipped around, nearly falling out of the chair, but no one was in the lab, aside from her and Vincent.  
"It seems that this mansion is haunted," She muttered, chuckling nervously. "You knew this, Vincent?"  
She stood up, using the table as a support. Her back ached, and her legs fell asleep while she was analysing Hojo's notes on doctor Valentine's work. She slowly walked to the glass tank filled with Mako solution and looked up, into the still, emotionless face of the man floating there.  
"You know, Vincent," She continued, "I think this house is not only haunted. I think, it's _cursed_. I know, I know," She lifted her right hand in a placating gesture, as if expecting him to argue, "To believe in superstitions is illogical and unbecoming for a scientist, but..." She shook her head. "This place seems... Seems evil. Doesn't it, to you?"  
His face didn't change in the slightest. Lucrecia looked away, closed her eyes, trying to hold back tears. Of course, she knew that he wasn't able to answer; his body was barely clinging to life, after all. Even the Binding Materia and restorative liquid couldn't do more than simply keep his spirit from leaving his slowly-decaying body.  
"Maybe he can hear the sound of my voice, if not my words," She thought, touching the cold glass of the tube and regretting that she couldn't touch him. "Maybe it will help him to hold on until I find a way to cure him. Or, maybe, I'm simply deluding myself and he doesn't hear anything."

She turned away from the tank and went back to her table, but half a way to it she stopped and turned to Simon's workstation instead. He was always adamant about keeping a record of all he was doing; how helpful it would be if she had an opportunity to read his research notes. She already looked through his papers, both on the table and in his drawers, but didn't find anything, so he must have been keeping all records on the mainframe.  
The work folders on the mainframe were designed so that the private files could be accessed only from the owner's terminal. For the files to be accessible by the others, they should be copied to the common folder first, and from there, anyone could copy them to their private space. Unfortunately, there were no data on this project of his in public folders. Lucrecia supposed he kept it private and, probably, encrypted.  
To her great surprise, when she turned Simon's computer monitor on, she saw that the workstation wasn't even locked. This was very uncharacteristic for Simon; he always kept his data secure, why he became careless all of a sudden? "Probably, he planned to return here later," She thought. "And there's only two of us here now, so maybe he decided all these security measures were a bit excessive. Anyway, let's not question luck. Whatever the reason, now I have the access and that's exactly what I needed."

Lucrecia sat down in Simon's chair. If he indeed was going to return, it would be better to copy as much information as possible before he comes and throws her out of his work place. Using first Simon's terminal and then her own, she copied the research notes into her folder and hid them in an innocent-named subfolder. Then, glancing minutely at the door over her shoulder and feeling like a thief about to be caught, she sent files to the printer. The time was nearing 4am, her back was aching, the baby was kicking again. She supposed it would be better to stop for now.

...

With a stack of papers tucked under her arm, Lucrecia cautiously went up to her room, listening for any unusual sounds. Outside, the wind was whistling through the tree branches, and the old trees in the garden were creaking under its blows, but inside the building all was quiet. Simon was, most likely, sleeping in his room.  
She left the papers on the bedside table and made her way down to the kitchen for something to eat. The tap water was smelling foul, but she drank a whole glass of it anyway.  
The silence of the empty house was so complete and yet so fragile that Lucrecia walked on tips of her toes, afraid of disturbing it. She had a strange feeling that by being too loud she could wake up something... she wasn't sure what exactly, and didn't want to know. Only in the closed space of her small room she could breathe with relief. Here, where the warm yellow light of the reading lamp illuminated well-familiar furniture, where sounds weren't echoing from the walls, she finally felt safe.  
Settling onto her bed, she wondered, if Simon knew about her going to the lab, if he knew what she have found there.  
"His research data was suspiciously unprotected," She thought. "Maybe that was what he expected from me. Maybe he wanted me to find Vincent and try to correct whatever he did wrong with him, but didn't feel like asking me outright. If he really didn't want this, why didn't he dispose of the body? Or, maybe, I'm overthinking it and he simply was careless."

The very first look at Simon's notes gave her the information she was trying to remember. Project Berserker, of course! Named after the legendary tribe of people capable of turning into powerful beasts that guarded the entrance to the underground realm of the Goddess of Life, it was one of the first projects of the BioWare team, the new BioMed research group on which Hojo had been before he was reassigned to the Jenova project.

In all the years Mako and Materia were studied, even the very best scientists couldn't develop a method of mass-producing Summon Materia. With other types of Materia it was relatively easy, because the information matrix for the spells was more or less simple. Summons were much more complex, and all attempts to artificially create such Materia failed, making the idea of arming soldiers with summons impossible.  
The direct approach with Mako enhancement wasn't working too well either; with the increase of dosage, the occurrence of severe side effects rose too rapidly. In the end, the methods for Mako-induced temporary boost of physical abilities were developed, but in most of the subjects, the effects on their physical abilities weren't good enough and wore off too quick.  
The Berserker project was a joint project of BioMed and Mako&Materia Divisions, an attempt to implement a new approach: instead of enhancing human body to achieve super-human strengths, the project group intended to develop a method that allowed the enhanced individual to temporarily, at their will, transform their body into a more powerful form, not too different from summons. Summon Materia was used in the process of the enhancement as an informational pattern for a powerful form.

The idea seemed impressive and logical enough, but the experiments on several volunteers ended with almost all of them dead before the transformation could be completed. Human body, even Mako-enhanced, simply wasn't able to withstand the change. The most promising of the subjects, the only one who managed to survive the first transformation, turned into a grotesque, insane monster, broke out of the holding cell, killed a couple of the assistants and wreaked havoc in the BioMed labs until he was finally shot dead by the project leader, dr. Sarah Simmons.  
After the incident the Berserker project was cancelled. And, as a side effect, the amount of BioMed employees among the regular visitors of the Shin-Ra shooting range increased dramatically.

Somehow, Grimoire's research of Chaos and Omega gave Simon an idea of how to successfully make human body capable of transformation. Vincent still had human appearance, so Simon's approach either didn't work at all, or it worked and allowed the subject to transform back and forth.  
Lucrecia made herself comfortable, sitting cross-legged on top of bed covers, papers to her left and a plate of cheese sandwiches to her right, and began to read.

...

On the windowsill outside sat a big brown-grey owl. Lucrecia stopped in her tracks, staring at the bird, and it stared back with its round yellow eyes through the dusty glass of the window.  
"Shoo," Lucrecia said. Her voice sounded weak and uncertain even to her own ears. The owl looked at her with contempt and turned away.  
Lucrecia came closer, hoping that her proximity would spook the bird, but it didn't react at all. She looked past the owl, to the world outside. It was dark, so dark that almost nothing was visible, only velvety blackness filled with bright dots of stars. The stars were all around, above and below, as if the mansion was floating on the ocean surface in dead calm.  
Suddenly the owl took off, startling her, and flew through the darkness on spread wings. Lucrecia followed it with her eyes until the bird disappeared. One of the stars at that spot was bigger than the others; not a dot, but a small bright disc. For some reason, that sight bothered her.

"You are still looking in the wrong place."  
Lucrecia turned around. Behind her, in a dark corner where light couldn't quite reach, stood Grimoire Valentine.  
"I don't understand, doctor Valentine," She said. "What am I looking for?"  
He chuckled. "For truth," He said. "Or, probably, for yourself. For purpose, or for freedom. It's your choice, not mine. But staying here you cannot find anything. These walls protect you, but they don't hold any answers. For these you have to go deeper."  
"Deeper - where?" She asked.  
He lifted his right hand, pointing the direction. "Down."  
"To the lab?" She asked, frowning. Hadn't she been there recently? What "truth" could she find there?  
"The... lab? Ah. You really don't know, do you?" He chuckled again. "Go and see for yourself."  
She looked to the left. The corridor seemed to stretch for miles, marked with yellow circles of light from the lamps. "O-okay," She said. "I'll go then."  
Grimoire's answer was silence. She glanced at him, but there was no one there, only shadows. Sighing, she turned the direction he was pointing and made the first step. For some reason, she felt nervous.

When Lucrecia woke up to the familiar ringing of the alarm-clock and the dream disappeared, she felt relief mixed with disappointment. "I should follow doctor Valentine's advice and go to the dream-lab. Probably, then my subconscious will be satisfied at last," She thought. "But what would I find there?"  
She rose from her uncomfortable position and stretched, groaning quietly. She fell asleep on the top of bed covers, surrounded by scattered papers. The empty plate ended up on the floor, though she didn't remember it falling down.

...

The Mansion would be as silent in the day as in the night, if not for Suzy who was cleaning the hall, singing softly. The second floor was empty; Simon was nowhere to be seen or heard. Bright morning sunrays peeked through the tall windows, and tiny speckles of dust danced in light.  
Lucrecia briefly thought of going down to the kitchen for a breakfast, but decided to check on Vincent first. She still had only a vague idea of what exactly Simon tried to accomplish and why did he need the tainted Mako samples for it. "I'll eat later," She promised herself, heading to the basement.

In the lab, nothing changed from the night before. Lucrecia was relieved to see that no one seemed to come there while she slept. Probably Simon didn't know what she was up to. Probably he didn't care.

The monitors of Mako tank showed the same readings as before. Vincent's condition seemed to be more stable than she expected.  
"Hello, Vincent," She said, smiling at the motionless figure inside the tank. "How is your sleep? Don't worry, I'm going to help you. Just hold on a little longer."  
His pale face stayed still, not a muscle twitched. Lucrecia supposed that she shouldn't feel so much disappointment at that as she did. Sighing, she turned away from the tank and went to her terminal.

Hours went by, marked by nothing except for changing of white numbers on the black screen of the digital clock, growing ache in Lucrecia's back and increasing activity of the fetus in her womb. When she finally decided to take a break and went to eat so the baby would calm down, the sky visible in the windows was getting dark. Suzy was gone, and the silence was nearly complete. From under the door of Simon's room, a stripe of light could be seen; he had returned, then. Lucrecia quickly descended the steps to the first floor, hoping that he would stay where he was and wouldn't come to talk to her.

She made a valiant effort of eating a plateful of soup, but ended up more pushing it around than eating, and gave up after a while. She disposed of the uneaten food and went to the kitchen sink to wash her dishes. Opening the water tap, she suddenly remembered how they used to do this before - before the Project began, before Professor Faremis left. Iffie would keep her company; one of them would wash the dishes, and the other would dry them. They would chat and laugh, and often either Hollander, or Professor Gast, or both would join them, and Simon, probably, too, though far less often than she'd like then. They would talk about the Ancients, and Mako, and ecology, and space rockets, and Shin-Ra educational system, and just about anything, for a long time after the dishes were done. Hojo and Hollander would end up arguing, not agreeing even on the color of the sky, and Hollander would begin gesticulating so wildly that he nearly knocked the furniture down, and Professor Gast would listen to them, not intervening until the argument would get too heated, and then he would stop it with just a word...  
She noticed that she was crying only after the dished was already clean and placed into the cupboard.  
"No sense in dwelling on the past," She thought, wiping the tears off her cheeks. "I'm alone now, and there's a lot of work to do no one would do except for me, so I'd better return to it."

The light inside Simon's room was not off yet, and she could hear him pacing, the floor boards squeaking with every step. The steps moved to the door, and she froze in the middle of the corridor, afraid that he would come out and demand that she stopped what she was doing, that she would stay away from Vincent.  
A moment later the steps moved away from the door, and she hurried to the lab.

...

The sky was getting brighter. Soon the sun would rise over the sharp cliffs, chasing away darkness from the narrow ravines of the Mount Nibel and its foothills. The old Mansion was sleeping; slept, bound by spells, monsters in sealed basement chambers; slept the half-dead man, suspended in the regenerative liquid; another man, who put the first where he was now, slept too, as undisturbed as always. Slept the unborn child, changed through science and ignorance into something that was too dangerous to exist.

Slept the woman who was having dreams of not quite her own making.

...

The land below lay flat, grey and lifeless. The cities stood deserted, empty shells of houses eroded with wind and water. The places where forests once stood were covered in black skeletons of trees, reaching their withered branches into the bleak sky. The ground was littered with bones, big and small, stark white in the bright sunshine.  
"The world is dying," The wind sang, blowing through the feathers of her wings.  
The world seemed to be already dead.  
"We can save it," The wind sang. "We can give it a new life."  
"How?" She asked, and, though her words were just a soundless whisper, the wind heard.  
" _Burn it_."

...

"Burn it," Echoed in Lucrecia's head when she jerked awake, raising her head from the table where she fell asleep. The lab was quiet. Yawning and stretching, she looked at the clock. It was just past eleven in the morning. She was supposed to get up at eight to receive the next Mako injection, but forgot about it.

Simon was sitting in the common room downstairs, reading a book. When she ran in, holding her belly with one hand and panting after a too-quick walk, he raised his head and squinted at her.  
"I'm... uhhh... sorry," She panted, trying to get her breathing under control. "I've got... uhhh... distracted."  
The corners of his lips twitched a little, as if he was suppressing a smile. "Certainly," He said, putting the book aside. "It must have been something... very interesting."  
She glared at him. He raised his eyebrows, daring her to continue. She shook her head. "Let's go," She said. "I want my shot."  
"Of course." He stood up and headed to the door. Lucrecia followed him as he went up the staircase and to the left, to the Gast's old room where they set up their new lab.

As usual, before the injection, he Med-Scanned her and inquired about how she was feeling, if she had had any more hallucinations or nightmares. She told that her problems with eating continued and her dreams were mostly just boring. For some reason she couldn't quite define, she didn't tell him about Grimoire or her very last dream.

Later, when the shot was done and it was clear that Lucrecia didn't suffer any immediate after-effects, Simon walked her back to her room and helped her to get into the bed. She expected him to leave right away, but instead, he stood beside her bed and began in serious tone, "Lucy."  
She stiffened, looking at him warily.  
"The Headquarters are dispatching another Turk to look over us," He continued. "I talked to them yesterday."  
"Uh... Okay," She said, relaxing.  
"I got Veld to instruct his subordinates to not get in the way of our work. They are forbidden from going anywhere near the labs. I hope," He looked at her, "You understand how crucial it is that they do not interfere with our project. With _any_ of our projects."  
"Does he know?" She thought, stiffening again, but only said, "Yes, I understand."  
He nodded and turned away. A hundred of questions swarmed in Lucrecia's mind, racing to be said out loud, but before she could even decide if it was worthwhile to ask them, Simon was gone.

Tired and unable to concentrate because of the too-long work and too-short rest, but unable to sleep due to stimulating effect of Mako, Lucrecia was lying in her bed, staring absently at the ceiling. Thoughts and ideas appeared at the edge of her consciousness, swirled around and went away, uncaught. The bright patches of sunlight on the floor slowly moved along the floorboards. Semi-transparent flames were appearing and disappearing around her, gradually becoming more visible.  
Some time later she became aware of voices that sang something. She strained her ears, trying to catch the words.  
"Sephiroth," They were repeating. "Sephiroth."  
"Sephiroth," She whispered. "My son."  
" _Our_ son," The voices corrected her, "Our son, our god, _our_."  
"Who are you," She whispered.  
The voices faded out, only to return with renewed force.  
"We are his true mother."  
"No, I'm his mother," She argued.  
"He is ours, our son, our god, a destroyer and a creator," The voices sang around her, ignoring her words, and flames rose higher. "With us, he will inherit the world. What can _you_ give him, human, except for weakness?"  
The words cut like sharp knives. "No, no, please, stop," She whispered, trying to get up and failing, her body refusing to move. Ghostly flames filled the whole room, dancing all around her. She shut her eyes tight, but voices and images did not stop.

"Mother..."  
A dark figure darting through night and fire, leaving behind a trail of dead bodies.  
"Come with me..."  
A huge stone, bigger than a mountain, falling towards the ground, towards a man standing on the snow-covered cliff, his hands outstretched to the sky.  
The planet, cracking open, spilling the green Mako.  
The man, laughing triumphantly.  
A shadow rising behind him - a woman in black, purple eyes glowing, silver hair shifting restlessly, sharp teeth bared.  
"To the Promised Land."

Suddenly it was over. The flames disappeared, the voices gone silent. Only birds were chirping outside.

"Mako-induced hallucinations again," Lucrecia thought, feeling tired and weak, and turned to her side, closing her eyes in an attempt to get some sleep after all. "I have to tell Simon."

"What if I saw the truth?" She thought, before falling asleep. "What if Sephiroth will really do what I saw in these visions?"

"What if the Project was a mistake that will lead to the end of the world?"

...

The thoughts about the vision didn't leave her while she worked on Simon's research notes in the underground lab; she relived it again and again while eating her late meal, while composing the weekly report for Professor Faremis.

"It's just a hallucination," She told herself again and again, but didn't believe herself.

She had to talk to someone. Not Simon, because his views on dreams and visions were very well known to her. And so she ended up sending another message to Ifalna.  
"He will destroy us," She sent, believing that Iffie will somehow understand what she was talking about.  
The response was a disappointing, "Who?"  
"My son," Lucrecia sent back, already knowing that her friend can't help her too.  
A few minutes later, the device printed the answering message that read, "Why you think so?" and she understood that she was truly alone in this.  
No one understood her. No one would help.  
She could rely only on herself.


	5. Chapter 5

_Sample: SWBR-0276/061955, Soul-Binding Materia_   
_Origin: Bluegill Ruins, Southern Wutai_   
_Primary effect: Revival of dead or dying creature. "The chains of Life... that bind a soul to a body." (Source: CCSV-0097/111912, a Cetra tablet)_   
_Side effects: Unknown, possibly - prolonged lifespan_   
_Usage: Once (Is destroyed in the process)_   
_Other samples of the same type:_   
_CCSV-0098/111912, origin: Cosmo Canyon cave settlement "Sky Village". Used in experiment by M. Wong, Wutai Institute of Historical Research, the year 1913: the Materia sample was used on a lab mouse that was killed immediately before; the sample melted and evaporated, vapour was completely absorbed by the subject's body. The mouse was revived, although its injures were not healed. Cure Materia was used. The animal lived for 6 more years, until it died in a fire._   
_Additional notes: According to legends, is capable of animating a previously inanimate object, placing a soul into it, although the exact procedure is unknown._

Sighing, Lucrecia put dr. Valentine's short note on the Binding Materia aside. She already knew it by heart, having read the short notes for a dozen of times in the previous few days. Vincent was kept in half-alive state by the Materia, but, despite the regenerative effect of Mako, his body wasn't healing, instead continuing to fall apart. On cellular level it looked like an autoimmune reaction, only his immune system was attacking not one type of tissue, but all at once, and she still didn't know how to stop it.  
Immunosuppressants wasn't helping.  
Nothing she knew should work worked in this case.

She put her forehead into her palm and massaged her temples. Almost a week passed since her last vision; luckily, she didn't have any more hallucinations, but today was the day of the next injection, and she wondered if she would be able to continue her work afterwards, or would be forced to rest until night.  
The clock showed 05:00. She still had some time, probably enough to finish putting together her first model of the process that brought Vincent to his current condition.

Vincent's gunshot wound was lethal; neither Phoenix Down, nor Cure would help him. Hojo used the Binding Materia, reviving the Turk, and put him into the Mako tank.  
The effect Materia had on Vincent's body gave Simon an idea that he would survive the infusion of Materia-structured Mako solution that was created in Berserker Project. But instead of repeating the same process with Summon Materia, he used the samples from Crystal Cave.

Lucrecia remembered these samples' structures very well; she was the one who assisted dr. Valentine in his research of them.  
The Grobovski-Raben law stated that _bioplasma particles that belong to the same information model attract each other_. In normal Mako, particles of the same type formed distinctive circular flows; when structured by a Materia, the particles that were parts of the same information model were drawn together, forming a multi-layered structure, not so different from an onion, and other particles formed circular flows around it.  
The bioplasma gathered from the Crystal Cave in its original state consisted of fully-formed superstructures made of interconnected multi-layered spheres, with almost zero count of free particles. Dr. Valentine believed these structures contained the information model for Chaos - a very powerful summon.  
But when they've tried to isolate one of the superstructures and structure Mako with it, the resulting energy outburst killed dr. Valentine.

Using methods the Jenova Project team developed, Simon managed to successfully structure a sample of Mako with "Chaos' superstructures", as dr. Valentine called them, and injected Vincent with it.  
Apparently, this approach worked at least partially, because Vincent not only became capable of transformation, but survived them. Unfortunately, he couldn't control the process. He stayed human only under sedation; when the spells were lifted, he immediately transformed and wasn't behaving like a sane person would, but more like a monster. There were three variants of the resulting form, as Simon described, and they all looked too different to be the same summon. When the spells were cast on Vincent again and he fell unconscious, his body returned to human form.  
After several transformations Vincent's immune system began to treat all his cells as threats, attacking them and nullifying the regenerative effect of Mako solution, and after some time Simon gave up on him.

The reversibility of the state Vincent was in remained in question. Lucrecia hoped that the first computer model, though being not entirely correct, would give her some ideas of how to proceed.  
By eight in the morning she finished keying in the parameters and, leaving the mainframe to compute the model, went to get her injection.

The first day of December was grey, but bright; windows let in cold white light of a winter day. Lucrecia remembered how chilly the corridors were the previous winter, but now she didn't know if it was the same. She thought that maybe she should feel cold in a lab coat over a thin sleeveless dress, but the air was neutral on her skin.

Stopping by the window in the middle of corridor, she looked at the slumbering garden. Large, but few and far between, snowflakes were falling leisurely to the dark ground, melting and disappearing there. The world was silent and surreal, and for a moment she wondered if it was one of her dreams.  
"No, it can't be," She reassured herself. "I've come here from the lab, so this should be reality."  
In her dreams these days, Lucrecia walked through the deserted Mansion, searching for the way that would lead her to the basement, but the corridors twisted and turned and always brought her back to the hall, as if trying to keep her away from her destination, and the tiny white disc among the stars on the black sky grew larger and larger, as if something - a moon? an asteroid? - was coming closer.

Immersed in thoughts, she saw Simon only when he stopped beside her, his arms behind his back, his gaze directed to the scenery outside. She glanced at him, noticing that his face, too, became thinner and paler. Under the white lab coat, he wore a thick woollen sweater; she supposed it was cold enough in the Mansion, after all.

"The obstetric team from the Headquarters will arrive by the end of January," Simon said, his voice disrupting the silence. Lucrecia nodded, turning her gaze to the window again. "A little more than two months," She thought, "And it will be over."  
Simon continued, "The equipment, however, will arrive by the New Year, because someone at the Department of Supply mixed up the dates."  
"Where will we set up the delivery room?" She asked, squinting against the bright light. Far away and high above the cliff tops, a dark winged shape was flying; a large bird, probably.  
"In the basement lab," He said. "We already have surgical equipment there."  
She shivered. Up until that day, she didn't think much about the childbirth; anyway, she wasn't going to have a natural one. Cesarean was deemed safer for the child in their case. No one knew if the fetus would live through the natural process. What would happen to her, was less important.

The dark bird-shaped creature let out a tiny, almost invisible flame out of its mouth. A dragon, then.

The significance of Simon's information reached Lucrecia only a few moments later.  
"Oh," She said, turning to look with wide eyes at Simon's neutral expression. It seemed she had only two months to fix up Vincent. "Thank you for warning, Simon."  
His brows knitted together, for a moment he looked like he was going to say something, but then he chuckled drily and turned away, motioning for her to follow.

While Simon went through the familiar steps of scanning her, he asked if she had more hallucinations or disturbing dreams.  
"It's not right to hide information from him," Lucrecia thought, trying to fight the strange reluctance she felt. "I'd better tell him, even just so that he could keep track of changes in my psychological condition."  
She opened her mouth, intending to tell Simon about the last vision.  
"But what would he do?" She thought. "The dosage is at the acceptable minimum. We can't lower it. And anyway, it's only for two more months."  
"Nothing," She lied. "Nothing of the sort since the previous injection."  
"Well, this is very good," Said Simon, writing down the Scan results. "It seems you finally are adapting to Mako."

She wondered if Simon would stop the experiment if it was clear that she was going to die if they continued.  
She wondered if she would let him stop it.  
Probably not.

"Yes, it seems so," She said at last.

...

"Maybe it's even better that I have these visions," Lucrecia thought later, lying in her bed after the injection. "The future doesn't exist yet, but there is a chance - even if not a big one - that there is some truth in them."  
The snow was falling slowly on the other side of the window. She followed the snowflakes with her gaze as they fell. The old-fashioned table clock on the nightstand beside the bed was ticking loudly. Simon was gone.  
"And if there is some truth, then I can treat them as a warning. If I know about a threat beforehand," She smiled wryly to the thought, struggling against fear, "I can prevent it."

This time she was ready for the hallucination that came, as previous one, subtly, - beginning with semi-transparent flames that danced on periphery of her vision and barely audible voices whispering around her like the wind singing in tall grass. Unlike the previous time, she wasn't scared as much. This wasn't a nightmare.  
"I'm not helpless," She kept on repeating to herself. "I'm just receiving information my brain somehow obtained when Mako entered my system."  
And if her brain chose this bizarre form to deliver the information... Well, she could deal with it.  
She would listen, and watch, and memorize.  
She would not let Sephiroth become a weapon.

"Weapon," The voices picked up. "Perfect weapon."  
The flames were rising higher and higher, through furniture and walls, through Lucrecia's body. Irrationally, she wondered if her son felt the heat of it, if it was damaging him.  
"Our son," The voices sang. "Ours."  
"Not yours," She whispered to the empty room. "I'm his mother. And I'll keep him safe."  
"Safety is an illusion," The voices surrounded her, circling around, whispering, crying and singing. "Dreams of the future are illusions. No truth, no hope, no way out."  
"Shut up," She said aloud, suddenly angry. " _You_ are an illusion. You are just a figment of my imagination. You don't _exist_!"  
The voices died away. The flames disappeared. Lucrecia relaxed, lying back on her pillows, and laughed, shaking her head. So much fear, for so long time, and all she had to do was to be brave and confront her nightmare.  
And if the sound of laughter, for some reason, echoed all around her in hundreds of different voices, she chose to take no notice of it.

The victory over her fear made Lucrecia almost happy, she even hummed a cheerful tune while walking to the kitchen. Washing her dishes after lunch, she danced around, with clean plate in one hand, other supporting her belly. The child was kicking lazily, and for a moment she imagined holding him - her precious son, her Sephiroth. She almost could see him, like she saw him in the dreams months before... and for a moment she caught a glimpse of - not a baby, but a small boy with brown hair and brown eyes, standing on the other side of the doorway.  
The plate dropped out of her hands, shattering on the floor. She flinched and glanced at the broken pieces; when she looked up again, the doorway was empty.

Settling again in her chair in the lab, she wondered if these visions were truly bits and pieces of the possible future, if it was something Cetra was capable of, - or if her brain under the influence of Mako simply showed her things she was terrified by or desperately longed to see.

...

Twelve days later Lucrecia reluctantly admitted that Vincent's condition could not be cured by any method known to her.  
The forces which cell by cell tore his body apart weren't of biological nature; it was something more - more base, more deep, and she hadn't had even a vague idea of what it could be.  
The only thing she knew for sure was that the changes went too deep to be reversed. It was impossible to cleanse his body of the traces of structured Mako.  
It was impossible to help him.

"I'm sorry," She whispered, looking up into the emotionless face of the unconscious man. "I don't know what to do now. I just... I'm sorry..."

Slowly she went back to the table, sat there, slumping forward and putting her head in her hands. Exhaustion, guilt and despair weighted on her shoulders like a huge boulder threatening to crush the fragile body. She sighed, glancing at her notebook. Almost three weeks of working non-stop, interrupting only when extremely tired or distracted by hallucinations... Only to prove all her ideas wrong and be left without a clue.  
On the front cover of the notebook, there was a line of circles drawn by her hand. She counted them: eight in total, two of them crossed out. The amount of hallucinations in past twelve days and the amount of them she couldn't control and was left sobbing and helpless. Both after the last injection. One time she almost was caught by the new Turk, a very young dark-haired woman who arrived a few days ago. The hallucination came when Lucrecia was trying to get some food in her stomach, but lasted only for a few moments, and by the time the Turk entered the kitchen she was able to pretend that nothing unusual had happened.

She looked at the Mako tank again. Vincent was as motionless as ever.  
"What else can I do?" She whispered. "Except for... for turning the machinery off and letting him die quickly? Oh Simon, why..."  
Simon! She struggled to her feet and, taking the notebook with her, turned to the exit. If there was anyone who could find a way, it was he. Simon was a far better geneticist than she ever was, and she desperately needed his expertise.  
If she had to beg him for help, she would.

The corridor was dark and dusty, the doors on both sides were locked. She remembered that Professor Faremis set up the lab in the basement because of a Mako vein located very close to the ground there, making the delivery of fresh, high quality Mako very easy. The small experimental reactor installed in one of the rooms which wasn't infested with monsters gave just enough power for the Mansion, and sometimes, when they turned on too much of the lab equipment, the lightbulbs dimmed and flickered.

The closer Lucrecia went to the stairwell, the less she was sure of her decision. Would Simon help her, even if she begged? What could she do to persuade him?  
Was even _his_ knowledge enough?

She stopped by the door, trying to handle the onset of doubts. "I need him," She thought. "I can't do this alone, I need help." Gathering her strength, she took a step forward, crossing the threshold.  
The weak overhead lights suddenly became much darker, and the blackness of the stairwell filled with ominous red of flames.  
"Not now," Lucrecia whispered, backing off. The ground tilted under her feet, and she stumbled to the side, her shoulder connecting painfully with the rough stones of the wall. Her legs gave way and she slid down to the floor. "Get up," She thought, "I have to get up. I have to talk to Simon."  
"No help," The voices sang around her. "No help, no hope, no way back."  
A new wave of despair hit her. There was no hope. No one would help. She was alone.  
"No, you're wrong," She argued, to stubborn to give up so easily. "There's Simon, and Professor Gast, and Iffie. Someone will help."  
"No help," The voices sang, and with the words the visions came.

Vincent's body dissolves into the blackness of Chaos, disappearing before her eyes.  
Bullets pierce Professor Gast's chest, his mouth is opened with a last cry, "Ifalna, run!"  
Wind blows through a large city, playing with pieces of paper and cellophane, rolling them over the grey cracked asphalt, over white bones.  
"No help. No hope. All is lost."  
Ifalna, engulfed by flames, holding the Magic Barrier with the last of her strength - and failing.  
The sky is clear and discolored and absolutely empty.  
Red blood drips from Simon's mangled fingers, his arm hanging down from the steel surgical table, his body broken, the last faint smile playing on his pale lips.  
The world is dead, devoid of any traces of life. All that left is a bare skeleton, and even it is beginning to crumble.  
"No hope. No help. No way back."

Lucrecia shut her eyes tight, but the visions kept on coming: everyone she knew, everyone she loved, dying, dying, dying, over and over again.

When at last they disappeared along with the flames, Lucrecia was left weeping helplessly, the voices still echoing around. Slowly they faded out, but she stayed where she was, sitting on the stone floor with her back to the wall. Under the dim light of lamps she could see the hem of her light blue dress, dirty with dust from the floor. She couldn't find the strength to move. Everything was pointless. She was alone. No one would help her.  
A voice came, whispering into her ear, "You don't need their help."  
She only sighed.  
"You are strong," It whispered. "So strong, so brave, so clever. You can save him. You can save them all."  
"How," Lucrecia asked, almost soundless.  
"There is no way back, but you can always find the way forward."  
"The way... forward." Lucrecia echoed, feeling like the clutches of despair on her loosened.  
"You are not alone," The voice sang softly. "Not alone. Never alone. We are with you."  
Warmth washed over her body, and she felt her energy returning and her brain functional again.  
How could she miss this option? Of course! There was no way back to Vincent's pre-experimentation state, but there should be a way forward. Simon used the process that was developed for normal Mako and normal Materia, but who said the same approach would be correct for Chaos' superstructures?

"Simon, we both are idiots," She muttered, and, chuckling quietly, began to stand up. "How could I forget that you aren't as good with Materia as I am? How could I think that you couldn't make a mistake?"  
She shook her head and, turning her back to the stairs, headed to the lab.

...

Over the course of the next few weeks she worked relentlessly on the process of properly structuring Mako. The frequency of the hallucinations was rising steadily, but after the worst of them, when she was left weak and sobbing, the mysterious voice returned, reassuring her and bringing her warmth and strength. And if it sounded a bit like the voice of a woman from her nightmares, Lucrecia was willing to overlook this similarity.  
It was a small price for not being lonely.

The New Year's Eve came and went unnoticed. When once again, almost a week after the New Year, she went to the telegraph to send the weekly report, she found messages of congratulations from Shin-Ra Central, Hollander's team and Professor Faremis.

Lucrecia looked out of the window; the sun was setting, coloring the snowy mountain peaks in tones of orange and red. Somewhere out there people were celebrating. Somewhere, in other people's houses, the green trees stood, decorated with coloured glass balls, covered in tinsel and shining garlands, and men and women were dancing, laughing and drinking. Somewhere - in another world far, far away, she thought, in the world where she belonged once.  
She wondered if she would ever again belong there.

The baby kicked at her liver, making her wince. Sighing, she turned away from the window.  
The world could wait. Vincent could not.  
The last attempt nearly resulted in properly structured Mako. Her work was almost done.  
"Only a little longer," She promised, though she wasn't sure if it was meant for Vincent, or Sephiroth, or herself.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If anyone's still reading this story and waiting for updates - I'm very sorry for the delay. Been too busy, and my writing muse decided to take a break. Now she's returned and, hopefully, will stay with me. :)

Lucrecia squinted, holding a small test-tube against the light of a lamp and looking through it. The dark substance was swirling within it - black, but not opaque, tiny shimmering particles moving restlessly inside it like the images of galaxies in the Astronomy lab.  
This was her success, the structured Mako she was trying to make for the past weeks. Only a drop of it, but it didn't matter. If her theory was correct, even a smallest amount was enough to help Vincent.  
She knew now what went wrong with Simon's experiment. The procedure he performed on Mako sample ripped the Chaos superstructures apart, resulting in an unstructured mix of parts torn from contradicting information models, and they were tearing Vincent's body apart; the properly structured Mako she made was going to fix the broken parts, making the information model of Chaos whole again and stopping the decay.

"I've done it," She whispered, still marvelling at the liquid.  
Doctor Valentine would be proud, she knew. She accomplished what they were trying to do together years ago. Like they went through the myths and legends surrounding Chaos and Omega and peeled off the false ones until only truth left, she peeled off layers of foreign information models and found under them the true essence of Chaos.  
This would redeem her and dr. Valentine in the eyes of the scientific community. Now, their theories wouldn't be as easy to brush off. Now, no one would say they were founded only on fairy tales. She would restore Grimoire's good name, as well as her own.  
She imagined Professor Gaeb's face when he learned of this, and laughed to herself. "I wish you could see that, doctor Valentine," She whispered to the memory of the dead man, and for a moment she could almost see his smile and hear his soft laughter echoing her own.

Shaking off the memory, she went to the Mako tank which housed Vincent's unmoving form and smiled at him.  
"Here, look, Vincent," She told the sleeping man, lifting her black treasure higher, as if he could see it. "This is what your father and I had found. I'm going to cure you now. Are you ready to wake up?"

It was easier said than done. Vincent was unlikely to survive even a few seconds outside the regenerative liquid. Of course, the tank was equipped for such occasions: gloves, IV pumps and surgical tools, - but she wasn't as proficient in using them as Simon was.  
"If only I had more test subjects," She thought absently, preparing to give Vincent the injection, and stopped abruptly, shocked at her own thoughts. Did she just regretted not having more people suffer like Vincent did? "Disgusting," She told herself, returning to the task at hand.

It was just as hard to find a vein as she expected. The gloves were thin enough, but larger than her size, and the green of Mako didn't let her see clearly. She sweated and swore and bumped her head into the transparent wall several times, but finally, finally the IV was set. Lucrecia wiped the sweat off her forehead and smiled at Vincent.  
"Well, here we go," She said, starting the infusion and activating the Med-Scan.

The black liquid quickly went through the thin line, disappearing into Vincent's left arm. The effect was instant: the process of decay stopped and brain patterns normalised. Lucrecia reached out for the control panel and was about to lift the Sleep spell, her hand hovering just above the Materia, but hesitated for a moment. Something wasn't right. Something...  
Suddenly, Vincent's body shuddered and arched. The skin around the point where Chaos' essence entered his vein turned black, and the darkness began to spread up and down the arm. The fingers turned into sharp claws. Lucrecia stared at them, stunned, when the low growl made her look up, to Vincent's face.  
He wasn't asleep. He wasn't human. His eyes were opened - two pools of gold, glowing with fury. He bared sharp teeth and rushed to the glass wall of the tube, attacking it with claws. Lucrecia backed off, thinking frantically.  
"What is this? What's wrong? What to do?"  
Her gaze fell to the control panel. In two large steps she was back at the controls, increasing the sedation.  
The spells alone weren't enough; the transformed creature seemed to be resistant to magic. Drugs, however, worked fine. The creature's movement became slow and uncertain, and then stopped altogether; Vincent's body slowly began to return to normal.  
When several minutes later the transformation ended, his left side was still not human. Lucrecia watched in horror at the darkness that moved beneath his skin - a bit further, a bit back, as if trying to take more control of him.

She backed off, shaking, until her backside connected with the side of her table, and slid down to the floor, hugging herself, still unable to tear her gaze from Vincent.  
"Why did this happen? What did I do wrong?"  
The essence did what she expected of it: the information models were fixed, and Vincent's body was healed. Why then did he transform? Was it her fault, or Simon's earlier experiments damaged him beyond any hope? Did Vincent she knew and loved still exist, or was it only an empty shell, filled with Chaos?..  
Guilt, helplessness and exhaustion returned, washing over her like powerful waves, dragging her into the depths of despair from which she had no hope of returning. She knew perfectly what she had to do: go through all the data again, think, think, think, find the answers, fix her and Simon's mistakes before the medical team from Midgar arrived.  
She was too tired for it, too tired, too weak and lost.  
But there was no one else who would do it.

...

Bright sunshine washed over her face, and shadows of leaves danced over her closed eyelids; she felt his presence beside her and smiled, turning her head to the side, towards him. The summer heat surrounded her - gentle wind, the sweet smell of blooming flowers, grasshoppers chirping, - and she was warm, so warm. Opening her eyes slightly, she looked into his eyes - brown eyes, so full of life and love...  
It was only a dream, she knew. It was but a dream of a memory of a day that happened somewhere in the beginning of the last summer - in another life, simpler and better than she had lived now. He would lean towards her now, she knew, and say the words that would tear them apart. She knew, but still hoped that he wouldn't say them, or that she wouldn't run away.  
His warm lips touched her own in a kiss, soft and light, and she felt his warmth reaching inside her, melting all the ice that somehow grew around her heart in these past months. She closed her eyes again, holding on to the memory, refusing to let it go.  
_Could she never wake again, could she dream forever?.._  
"You have to go," He said quietly, leaning into her, his breath tickling her ear. "Please, you must go. There is not much time left."  
"I don't want to," She whispered.  
"I know, but you _must_ go. You waited too long already. This is maybe your last chance."  
She sat up slowly, his strong hands helping her to move upright. Around them, the hot and sunny summer was blossoming, and she never wanted to part with it, - but he was right. There was the lab waiting for her, secrets hidden in the depths of the old Mansion, the truth she had to uncover.  
"Will you wait for me?" She asked, not meeting his eyes.  
"Always," He said.

The Mansion towered before her, dark, and old, and _waiting_. Reluctant to go, to part with her dream, she looked back at the sunlit meadow where she left Vincent, and gasped in awe. Gone were the green leaves; the garden was burnt out - black skeletons of trees, ground grey with ash, - and amidst it, instead of the man, a demon was standing, - blazing golden eyes, dark skin, claws, red wings, - but the creature's voice still retained some of Vincent's warmth when it spoke.  
"Go, Lucrecia. Go and don't look back."  
It was still him, his soul living in this strange body. Around him, thin green blades of grass stubbornly peeked through the ash, defying death, refusing to give up. And, looking at them, she was sure that he _was_ alive, and the hope was not lost.  
She smiled, waved him goodbye, and turned away from the memory of the summer garden, of happiness and heartbreak, and felt it inside her, tucked securely close to her heart. "We will make other, happier memories," She promised, still smiling, when the heavy doors opened before her. The memory of warmth, of love and sun guided her, and shadows ran away, and the path that wound around the Mansion and always led her away from the destination now was straight and clear.

At the top of the stair Lucrecia saw the big gray owl sitting on the windowsill outside; she almost expected it to be there. She smiled at the bird, and it opened its beak, as if trying to say something.  
"Sorry, can't hear you!" She laughed, and looked to the right. For a moment, she saw two different passages overlapping, both looking real and unreal at the same time, one that led forward and one that turned away, the latter slowly becoming more substantial while the other was fading away, - but the warmth inside her chest surged to almost unbearable height - heat and light, too bright, too sharp, too much, - and only the first corridor was left, the one that led to the basement entrance. She touched her breast, feeling for the beat of her heart, wondering if it was still there. It was right under her palm, - strong, steady and insistent.  
There was no more illusions, no whispers and ghosts, no more fear, only the path - and the truth that laid hidden on the far end of it.

The spiral staircase descended into the darkness of the underground passage. The light of lamps there was too weak to penetrate the thick purple mist that covered the floor, swirling and rippling around her knees. The walls seemed wet - black, glistening where the light reflected off the uneven surface. Lucrecia was almost sure that the walls were moving a little, bumps and depressions shifting, some parts protruding farther and retracting again, - or was it a trick of light?  
It was cold there, the deep, unforgiving chill that reached for her very soul, threatening to freeze it, but the dream still stayed with her, - a spark of sun, a memory of love, keeping her warm and alive, keeping her moving.

Through the darkness and mist she went, through the whispers that grew louder and louder, through the images that appeared before her eyes, fading in and out, - the pieces of her own memories, the visions of fire, and death, and destruction. Was they trying to stop her? Was they trying to help? She did not know, and did not care; the only thing that mattered was her destination.

The lab door was closed. Lucrecia pushed at it, but it didn't budge. She tried again, with more force, to no avail. Again she pushed, the last wave of warmth from the memory giving her strength, and suddenly the door opened wide, pulling her along - and outside.

"Go and see for yourself," Dr. Valentine told her so long ago, and Gaia, was it something worth seeing.

The underground lab did not exist there, as well as the underground itself. She found herself on a narrow trail along the side of a cliff, the doorway to the basement carved into the black stone. Lucrecia nearly fell off the edge into the abyss that stretched below. Clutching at the stone, she stared at the scenery, frozen by its unreal beauty: the blue, strewn with white heaps of clouds far under the floating island, the faint outlines of what seemed to be continents visible between them. There was no sound around her, a complete silence, disturbed only by the sound of her own laboured breath.  
A few minutes later she came to her senses and moved away from the edge, trying to catch her breath.

The path wound to the left and upwards. Slowly, staying close to the stone wall, Lucrecia began to walk - around the corner, up the rough stone steps, to the garden surrounding the mansion, to the same spot where her path began, the place where she left Vincent, - but there was no trace of the garden there. The ground was black and barren, hard, cold stone, and the Mansion that stood in the middle of the small flat area wasn't exactly the same she entered earlier. The closest visible side of the building still retained the shape Lucrecia knew so well, but other parts were grotesquely disfigured. Gone was the grey stone of the walls, replaced by glistening purple material that looked almost alive, its surface uneven, moving slightly up and down, as if breathing. Gone was the front entrance to the Mansion, hidden under the same material. Instead of the whole farthest wing of the building there was a strange construct - a tower that stood sagging to the side, more similar to a termite hill than to something built by human hands. The path led there, to the very top of the structure, and Lucrecia, though nauseated by the look of the purple substance, went there.

She still had no idea what was this thing she was seeing. The Shinra Mansion, floating in the sky on an island and half-turned into a termite hill?  
"If _this_ is the truth you meant, dr. Valentine, then I don't understand it," She muttered.

With the first step upon the spiral path, Lucrecia felt the whispers returning with more force than ever before in her dreams. They resonated through her in a song, or maybe a prayer, words bringing with them feelings, - fear and adoration, hope and despair, and while she went up the winding path she prayed, and hoped, and feared with them, unable to discern whether the feelings and the voice were her own or theirs, whoever they were.  
"Bring us hope," The voices around her sang, "Bring us strength."  
"Come, o come," They chanted. "Sephiroth, Sephiroth."  
She went up and up, swaying on her feet, only just managing to stay upright. She was aware of tears that streamed down her face, tears of joy, and hope, long years of waiting that weighed on her shoulders, - ages of waiting for the chance that might never arrive, but now, now, it was so close.  
"Mother of Gods," She prayed with the voices, "Saviour of souls."  
"Mother of Gods," She sang, "Bring the fire, bring the salvation."  
"Our creation, our son, our hope," The empty air around echoed, "Sephiroth, Sephiroth."

The path ended on a small round platform made of the same material as the tower itself. As Lucrecia stepped to it, the voices faded away, becoming only faint whispers, and she saw that she wasn't alone.  
Greeting her at the top of the tower was the woman from her early nightmares, and in her arms was the white-haired baby. Her Sephiroth.  
"You," Lucrecia said, angry. "What are you doing here? Give me my son back!"  
The woman laughed, the chorus of voices around picking up her laughter and echoing it, louder and louder, and then dying away.  
"You came here," She said, baring her teeth in a mockery of a smile, "All this way, and still you are clinging to your illusions."  
The pale hands lifted the baby high into the air.  
"It is time I showed you who he really is."

The white knitted blanket slid off the baby's body; underneath he was naked, small round knees pulled up to his belly, tiny feet crossed. He yawned and grimaced. Lucrecia made a move to get closer, to snatch the child from the hands of the woman - _the witch_ , as she began to call her. She was quick, but still too late: the woman took her hands off the small form, and he was left hanging in the air without any visible support. Lucrecia gave out a cry of fear, and then another, when the child's body began to transform.  
His eyes opened, purple and glowing, pupils like thin vertical slits. He opened his small mouth and hissed at her wordlessly. The upper part of his body still looked human, but the lower was changing - his legs fusing together, being replaced with something that resembled a flowerbud, - a round core at the baby's midsection, closed petals pointing down. The petals opened, becoming spread wings, white as clouds, and one of his arms turned into a wing too, a black one.  
"Sephiroth," The voices sang around, their delight and hope streaming through Lucrecia, washing off her own feelings. "Sephiroth."  
He was beautiful. Her - their - precious son, their last chance. No, no, - he was _her_ son, not theirs. He wasn't the son of a monster!.. He wasn't... a... _monster_?  
Eyes blurred by tears at the overpowering feelings, she took a step back, and another, and -  
Instead of the ground, her foot meet only air, and she fell, the vision of the god - the monster - the baby - _her son_ \- disappearing.  
Down, and down, and down she fell, through clouds, towards the ground, and the world turned red, and from the darkness and fire below the shadow rose, - black clothes, white hair, fiery eyes, - towering over the flames it was, and winds sang around it their song of destruction, "Come o come, Sephiroth!"  
The man - Sephiroth? - raised his head and looked at Lucrecia, uncertainty, hope and awe in his glowing eyes.  
"We meet at last," He said, his pale lips curving slightly in a smile, " _Mother_."

...

Awareness returned to her slowly, and Lucrecia found herself laying on the lab floor, where she apparently fell asleep the night before.  
"A nightmare, again," She thought, sitting up and rubbing the side that was aching from the uncomfortable position. She managed to find a way to the dream-lab, but what was the truth dr. Valentine mentioned? What was the important thing she supposed to learn there?  
Vincent, she remembered. The demon. The Mansion. The owl. The island in the sky. The purple thing. The woman - the witch. The...  
The baby.  
Was that the truth? Was her son truly a monster?  
"It's impossible," She thought. "We changed him using Cetra's cells, so he should be a half-Cetra."  
"But why did we decide that Cetra was what we wanted them to be - wise, kind, willing to help us - humans, who destroyed their race?"  
"And why was their race destroyed?"  
"What their race really was?!"  
Horror slowly crept up her spine, making her hair stand on ends.  
The shark-woman, the _witch_ \- what if she wasn't a personification of Lucrecia's deepest fears? What if she was what remained of the spirit of the long-dead Cetra? What if it had somehow wormed its way into Lucrecia's mind?  
She remembered the feelings brought by the voices - long ages of waiting, heavy waters of despair, and bright flare of hope, - and their calling to Sephiroth, "Come," they prayed, "Save us."  
"What did we create?" She thought. "What are we bringing into our world?"  
Now the idea that he would destroy the world didn't seem unreal in the slightest; with the power of Cetra in his hands, who could stop him?

_"I can."_

The thought made her freeze. But it was true, she could do it before it was too late, she could stop him - it - her son - no, no, her son didn't exist anymore, it was only the monster - she could destroy it.  
She shook her head. "What am I thinking about," She whispered. "I'm crazy."  
The movement inside her womb startled her; she stared at her belly, suddenly afraid that the baby - the monster - inside her would feel her intentions and try to get out, tearing her body apart.  
"No, it's impossible," She tried to reason with herself, "Simon checked it - no, not it, him - checked the baby only a few days ago, and everything was fine."  
The fear refused to go away. Lucrecia slowly stood up, wincing at pain in her body. She had to make sure that the baby was okay, that it still was the _baby_.

The way out of the basement seemed endless; she was still tired, and aching, and shaken by the revelation. The Med-Scan she performed on herself showed that the baby was still normal, but how could she trust her own judgement now? Her own eyes, her own mind, - if the witch was influencing her, then Lucrecia could not trust herself.

" _Who_ can I trust?"

Of course, her first choice was Simon.  
Fortunately, it was the middle of evening, and she found him in his room. At the sight of her he put his work aside and stood up, his brow furrowed in concern.  
"Scan me," She said, sitting down on the vacant chair. "Please, quick. Check the- the fetus."  
Without a word, he took the Materia. A minute later, he said, "The fetus is undamaged. What happened?"  
"I had another... vision," She said. "Are you sure it is alright? The - it's body - is it... _normal_?"  
"It is," He said. "As normal as it was earlier. Nothing has changed since the last time."  
She sighed and, relaxing, laughed softly, her body slumping with exhaustion and relief.  
"It was a nightmare, again," She closed her eyes, trying to calm down, to hold back the tears and hysterical laughter. "And here I hoped they wouldn't return anymore. I saw the - the baby, Sephiroth, turning into a m-monster. Are you sure... he... would be what we want him to be, Simon? Are we sure he will be a blessing for us and not a curse?"  
For a few minutes Simon was silent. She opened her eyes and saw him standing with his back to her.  
"Lucy," He began, still looking away. "I know that you are very interested in you current... side project. But, please, don't over-exert yourself. You have to rest more."  
He didn't believe her.  
She wasn't surprised.

Returning to her own room, she suddenly thought that Simon might be affected too. Anyone who worked with the dead Cetra's body could be - touched by her undead spirit, charmed by it.  
She cringed at the movement inside her, baby's - monster's? - limbs pushing at the walls of her womb.  
Why, oh why were they so willing to put the cells of a dead creature into human bodies, why were they so quick on believing it would benefit them?  
How could she be so blind, how could she let this happen to her child?

The daylight filtered, slowly fading, through the dusty windows while she laid in her bed, listening to the silence. There was no fire around her, no whispers, but she knew she would never be free of them again.  
They had opened the door, and the monster walked in, and while it was inside there was no hope, no future for her.  
She had to get rid of it.


	7. Chapter 7

Out of all people alive, Professor Faremis was the one who knew the most about the Cetra race. His knowledge and determination led him through a number of ancient tomes, through tombs older than any existing cities, through myths, and legends, and the frozen lands of the Northern Continent in search of traces of the mysterious race.  
To trust his expertise, to wait until he saw the newborn and let him decide the child's fate was a most logical thing, but as the sleepless hours stretched, night slowly giving way to the grey dawn, Lucrecia was becoming more and more doubtful.  
Yes, Professor Gast's knowledge was unquestionable, but he was so - _enamoured_ with the ancient race, so willing to believe in them being better than humans, so dismissive of any negative information about them...  
"What would he do," Lucrecia thought in these early hours, "If he saw that the child wasn't really human? If he witnessed the transformation, would he believe my words that the - that Sephiroth - is dangerous and we should dispose of him?"  
She imagined him looking at the monster she saw in her dream.  
"He would be fascinated," She thought. "He would say that we should take him - _it_ \- to Midgar and study it thoroughly, that we should let it grow and see what will become of it."  
And that was exactly what _the witch_ wanted.

Lucrecia remembered the day when the Professor left, her talk with Iffie who was trying to talk her out of participating in the project...  
Ifalna! The only member of their team who was always sceptical about the experimentation with Jenova's cells, who openly questioned Gast's decisions and opposed both Project G and Project S, and he more often listened to her than not. Ifalna, who knew almost as much about Cetra as the Professor himself.

Considering the time zone difference, it should be almost midnight in Woodlands; Lucrecia hoped that Iffie wasn't asleep yet. She climbed out of bed and hurried to the communication center.

"Were Cetra capable of shapeshifting?" She sent to her friend, and, a minute later, "Are we sure they didn't plan revenge on us?"  
The message was sent, and she sat there, waiting for an answer. By the time the message from Iffie arrived, the morning light was strong enough to clearly see the trees outside.  
"No evidence of shapeshifting," Lucrecia read, "Or of revenge. Why?"  
She sighed. How could she explain all that happened? Would Ifalna even believe her?  
"You were right," She answered. "It was a mistake."  
"What do you mean," Ifalna sent back.  
"Everything," Lucrecia thought. "I mean everything since you and Gast went away. Probably, everything since the beginning of the Jenova Project. It all was one huge mistake."  
To Ifalna, she sent, "Project S. It must die."

When the apparatus began to chirp, printing Ifalna's answer, the room door began to open. Lucrecia quickly tore the paper tape, balled it up together with the pieces that already were on the table and threw it into the trash bin.  
The young Turk looked into the room and, noticing Lucrecia, nodded, "Good morning."  
"Good morning," She answered, trying to sound calm. "I'm, uh, writing a report."  
"Okay," The girl said. "Are you alright? You are... very pale."  
"I'm... tired a little. I'd better go get some rest, I think."  
Heart pounding wildly, she stood up and left the room.

...

Vincent's condition didn't change overnight. He was unconscious, and the darkness was still there under his skin, shifting back and forth. Lucrecia has no idea what it was and why it affected him so; doctor Valentine's notes probably held the answer, but she couldn't concentrate on reading. Again and again her mind went back to the question that was the most important for her now.

What to do with her pregnancy?

"You know, Vincent," She murmured, "This has to stop. I'll go see Simon and tell him that I'm quitting the project. I can't let this... this _thing_ to stay inside my body any longer."  
She sighed, rubbing her eyes.  
"I'm so sorry, Vincent. I'll help you, I promise. But first, I must finish with this."

She went to the upper lab, but he wasn't there, and his room was also empty. There was no one in the Mansion except for her, it seemed. She considered returning back to the lab and trying to find some clues about the Vincent-Chaos problem, as she began to call it, but she was both too anxious and too tired to be able to work productively.

Pacing nervously around the empty rooms, Lucrecia came to the large hall on the first floor, where a year earlier their team celebrated the New Year and their first successful experiments with Jenova's cells. She remembered dragging Simon out of the basement to the party, and smiled. They danced - Ifalna later confessed she didn't think Simon could dance at all, - they all were having fun, and she was so happy then... So happy. Vincent wasn't with them, he arrived only a few weeks later; she'd never expect herself to fall in love so quickly with a man she barely even knew.  
"Except," She thought, "It was the same with Simon. I fell in love with him before I even had a chance to talk to him."

The time was nearing midday, but Simon didn't return yet. Tired of wandering through the house, Lucrecia decided to get some rest, after all. She supposed, Simon wasn't going to agree with her decision easily; she'd better be prepared for a serious argument.

...

Sleep didn't come to her for a long time; finally, Lucrecia gave up. She got out of bed and shivered at the unexpectedly cold air. It was much more comfortable under the covers, and the lab was probably even more chilly. She put on a cardigan and, wrapping it tightly around herself, opened the door.

And gasped, taking a reflexive step back.

Instead of the familiar corridor, there was a cave - or, maybe, a hole dug in wet purple soil by a giant earthworm. Dark roots - or, were they tails? - were sticking out of the surface, twitching slightly. Bronze sconces that were still in place, illuminating the picture, looked surreal on these walls. Windows were gone. Purple mist covered the floor, and when Lucrecia opened the door, it immediately flew inside the room.  
She jumped back into the room and shut the door tightly, but it was too late. Already she saw the purple substance beginning to spread over the walls and furniture, growing like mildew on every surface.

"Out," She thought. "I have to get out of here."

The purple mist was bitingly cold, and by the time she reached the place where the stair to the first floor should have been, her feet felt numb. The stair was still there, but most of the wood was covered in the same purple thing. Lucrecia quickly descended it, but there she found a dead end.  
The door didn't exist anymore. The whole lobby was transformed.

"The lab," She remembered. "There was an exit there."

She turned around and was met by a wide, toothy grin.  
Between her and the stairs, _the witch_ was standing.

"Let me go," Lucrecia said, moving to the left and trying to come around the woman, but she apparently guessed her maneuver.  
"Why?" The witch asked, blocking her path again. "Why are you still resisting? Are you _enjoying_ this suffering?"  
"What do you want from me?!" Lucrecia exclaimed.  
"Only that you accept your role. Nothing more. You already agreed to it, so why are you resisting now?"  
"I never agreed to anything like this!"  
"But you did, of course," Another voice supplied, and Lucrecia whipped around, looking in astonishment at the man she didn't expect to see there. Professor Faremis smiled at her and continued, "You agreed to become the mother of a god, to guide him and to serve him. This is the reason we began the Project S, isn't it, my dear?"  
"Professor..." She said helplessly, "What are you talking about?"  
"He means that you are being childish," Said Simon, emerging out of shadows. "You agreed to participate in the Project. Do you understand what a huge waste of resources it would be if you quit it now?"  
"I'm not quitting," She argued. "I just want this woman to go away."  
"Go away?" The woman laughed, and suddenly the three of them disappeared, and only the voice stayed behind. "Go away?"  
The laughter echoed around, growing louder and louder, turning into a thunder, but the witch's whisper, somehow, was clear in Lucrecia's ears.  
"How can I go away when the most part of me is _you_?"  
"You're lying," Lucrecia said, turning around, trying to catch the sight of the witch, but couldn't see anything except for the purple mist.  
"Stop resisting," The voice whispered. "The door that was opened cannot be closed again. You cannot resist me forever. Accept it. Be the guide for Sephiroth, and together we will raise him to be the god he is."  
"No."  
"Foolish creature. You can save you loved ones from death and oblivion-"  
"By turning them into _abominations_?!"  
The witch laughed. "Ah, so now you are beginning to value your humanity. Too late, my dear," She continued in Gast's voice, "You don't have much of it left in you."  
The mist that had been clinging to the floor earlier, now gathered around Lucrecia, its tongues licking at her skin, leaving behind trails of cold and flickering images of the dying world, and flames, and white bones. The last traces of the familiar surroundings were gone; the purple, faintly glowing, slightly moving walls made her feel like she was swallowed and about to be digested.  
"I've got to get out of here somehow," She thought. "But how?"  
There was something she should remember. Something...  
"This is just a dream."

Waking up wasn't easy this time; the dream refused to let her go, and she felt like she was trying to walk against a strong wind. But, gradually, the purple mist disappeared and she found herself in her familiar room. She touched her belly automatically. It was there, big and round. She was still pregnant, and that meant she wasn't dreaming anymore.

Lucrecia remembered her first nightmares that began right after the first Mako injections. She thought it was her body's reaction then, but she was wrong.  
It wasn't her.  
It was the _thing_ that was growing inside her, the thing that took over the fetus they injected with Jenova's cells. The thing that replaced the child with itself, and grew, becoming stronger and stronger. The thing that was moving inside her now, its movement making Lucrecia want to throw up.  
She couldn't let it live. She couldn't let Simon and Professor Faremis fall under its control. If it happened, the world was doomed.  
She had to destroy it - and soon, before the next time she fell asleep, for she wasn't sure if it will still be _her_ who will wake from it.

Lucrecia stood up, her body strangely clumsy, her head spinning, and managed only a couple of steps before the images flooded her vision.

 _A great hammer strikes, sending sparks around the dark cave._  
_The hammer strikes, but it's not a sword being born out of darkness and fire._  
_It's a_ baby _, a baby whose hair is brown and eyes are dark, but as hammer strikes and strikes, he's changing._  
_Not a baby anymore, but a small child - white hair, glowing blue-green eyes, face frozen in a carefully blank expression._  
_The hammer strikes._  
_The weaponsmith's face is lit by fire in the forge. The face is changing constantly, morphing between the features Lucrecia knows well: Professor Faremis, Simon, Ifalna..._  
_And herself._

With last of her strength, she tried to shake the visions off, and for a moment succeeded; then, the darkness took her.

...

She was soaring through the sky, over the white mountains of clouds. Her strong wings easily carried her over the dark, sleeping world.  
"Mother of Gods," The voices around her sang, "She who destroys, She who rebuilds."  
The great crater was dark as a bottomless pit. The would on the Planet's body, the place where the old world will find its death and the new one will begin.  
The vision changed. Now she again was flying high above the ground.  
"Mother of Gods," The voices whispered, "Savior or worlds. The beginning and the end."  
She knew now what to do. Save the memories of thousands of lives, prevent them from disappearing. Collect them and hand them to Her, to be rebuilt as Her creations.  
The town was burning. People were running around, screaming, swarming like mindless bugs. She cocked her head, looking at them. They were weak and pathetic. She raised her hand, filling the streets with raging flames. Through the fire she saw familiar faces. Her parents. Her friends. Simon. Ifalna. Professor Gast. Grimoire and Vincent.  
She burned them all.

Lucrecia was barely aware of the solid surface her body was lying on, of dull pain in her side and abdomen. Sometimes through the flames she saw Simon's face. He didn't belong there, in her world consumed by fire.

Something was happening to her body. The pain was getting stronger, briefly interrupting her visions, but when it faded, she was again swept away by wind and whispers.  
"Destroy," Whispered the voices.  
"Burn," Roared the flame.  
"Rebuild," The wind sang, slashed by quick movements of her wings.  
And then the pain returned, and the contours of the room, again, showed through the images of fire and destruction.

...

There was an annoying sound, mewling, like a voice of a small, lost animal. Not very loud, it nevertheless managed to reach her and pull her away from the visions.  
She was in the lab. The surgical lamp above her was turned off. She tried to move and found herself unable to lift her hands; she seemed to be strapped to the operating table. She turned her head to the side. Simon was there, his back to her. The source of the mewling sound was obscured by him. With curiosity, Lucrecia registered that she was shaking and her teeth were chattering, although she didn't feel cold. Something felt strange about her body. She raised her head, looking down at her stomach.  
It was flat. Not as flat as before the pregnancy, but flatter than she last remembered it.  
"Simon," She said. Her voice was hoarse, as if she was screaming recently. She didn't remember if she was.  
His back went completely still. Then, he silently turned around, grabbed something from the table and went to her.  
"Simon, is the baby okay?" She asked.  
He didn't say anything and didn't meet her eyes. A moment later, needle prickled her shoulder, and then he promptly returned to his table.

...

Lucrecia felt as if she was floating to the surface from the great, dark depths. Consciousness returned to her slowly, and gradually she became aware of soft linens around her and birds singing somewhere.  
She opened her eyes. It was her room around her now. She touched her stomach. Yes, it seemed that her last vision wasn't a vision. The baby was born.  
Sitting up was a bad idea; her head swam, and she almost fell down. While she was trying to regain her balance, the door opened and Simon went in. He noticed her, but didn't say a word. He went to the bedside table and put a glass of water onto it.

"Simon," She said. "Is the baby alright?"  
"Yes," He said dryly.  
"May I see him?"  
His eyes narrowed. "What for? Itching to finish what you started?"  
"What I... Simon, I don't understand."  
He looked at her, raising his eyebrows. "Indeed."  
"How is he? Please, tell me!" She begged desperately.  
He sighed and perched on the edge of her bed. She looked at him, taking in his grey, tired face, the bags under his eyes, his unkempt hair and wrinkled shirt.  
He looked bone-tired and old, as if years had passed since she fell asleep.  
"He is preterm," Hojo said, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "Has difficulty maintaining body temperature. 47 centimeters in length, 2340 grams weight. Needs a steady Mako supply, just as we predicted. It's very fortunate I finished modifying the ICU earlier than I planned."  
"What happened?" She asked softly. "Why the birth happened prematurely?"  
"You don't remember." He stated.  
"No, I don't."  
He remained silent for a few more moments and then stood up.  
"Wait, Simon!" She exclaimed, trying to sit up. "Where is he? Please, let me see him!"  
"I will," He said. "But only when I'm sure you are in your right mind."  
"In my... right mind? Simon! What happened here?!"  
For a moment, she thought he was going to answer, but then he turned away and went to the door.  
At the threshold he stopped, glanced back at her, hesitating for a moment before speaking. "Is the boy... Is Sephiroth _my_ son?"  
"I..." _I don't know._ "I'm sorry," She whispered.  
Hojo left the room and carefully closed the door behind him.


	8. Chapter 8

Once upon a time, when the Project S had just started, when Sephiroth had been a tiny unnamed embryo untouched by Jenova's cells, and Professor Faremis with Ifalna had just left on their expedition, Lucrecia had had a dream.  
In that dream, she had lain in her bed, surrounded by family and friends. Vincent had been standing beside her, holding a small baby wrapped in a white knitted blanket, while her parents had been looking at the child, smiling and cooing at him. Simon and Professor Gast had been quietly discussing the baby's unusual characteristics, all wonderful and beneficial. And, sitting on the edge of her bed and smiling, had been her best friend Ifalna.  
In that dream, Lucrecia had felt exhausted, but very happy, and that happiness had stayed with her even after she had woken up, making her think that the future really was bright and promising.

Sitting alone in her room after Simon had left, Lucrecia remembered that happy dream and how she had hoped that her childbirth would be like that. Instead, she was alone, now more alone than she ever had been before; her child was taken from her, and she never even held him in her arms.  
The snow-covered mountain peeks visible through the window were shining pristine white under morning sun, and merry birds were chirping, delighted with the warm weather, but in Lucrecia's mind, dark thoughts were circling.  
Why had Simon reacted like that, she wondered. He had seemed almost wary of her - he, who had always been fearless to the point where she doubted he was even capable of feeling scared. What could have happened?  
Her memories of the past - days? _weeks_? - were dim. She knew she had been afraid of nightmares and hallucinations, but what they were about she could not recall. The last thing she remembered was going to sleep, - the previous night, she supposed, - and then struggling to wake up, while something in her dream was refusing to let her go. But the dream itself was just a blur in her memory. She had been scared out of her mind, but of _what_ , exactly?  
She vaguely remembered her suspicions about the baby not being a human, but couldn't say if there had been any evidence, or if it all was just hallucinations-provoked paranoia. Had Simon witnessed one of her hallucinations? Probably he had. Probably, it had been bad enough to provoke a premature birth...

Sighing, Lucrecia shook her head. Whatever had happened, Simon didn't trust her sanity now, and she had to prove that she was in her right mind. That shouldn't be a problem. Her hallucinations were caused by Mako, and now she wouldn't be receiving it anymore, so all side effects should stop.  
She wondered how much time had passed since the birth; it must have been hours. It was time to check on Vincent.  
Lucrecia slowly climbed off the bed, holding on the headboard for support, and, when the room stopped spinning around her, looked herself over; her limbs, sticking from under the light green cloth of the baggy hospital gown, looked unnaturally thin and too pale. She pulled off the gown and examined her body.  
Her stomach returned to the shape in had before the pregnancy. There was no pain, no trace of any after-effects of pregnancy. Even her breasts didn't change in the slightest.  
If she wasn't absolutely sure that her pregnancy had really existed, she'd think it had been just a dream.  
She caressed her flat abdomen and felt a pang of longing again, - she missed her child's movements, his tiny feet kicking at her palm. How long she'd have to wait until she finally would be allowed to hold him?  
"Not very long," she reassured herself. "I only have to be calm, collected and professional, and Simon will soon understand that I'm sane enough and let me see the baby."

Leaving the room, she remembered the glass of water Simon brought; she wasn't thirsty - or hungry. It was odd, but before Lucrecia could think more about it, she felt something unusual. A sensation of warmth radiating from somewhere to the left, similar to how she felt the North magnetic pole, but smaller and closer. She followed the sensation, treading slowly through the corridor and ending in front of the locked door of the upper lab. She could hear hushed sounds coming from behind the door: footsteps, keyboard clicking, a quiet voice. Apparently, Simon was there. A moment later, a baby's crying added to the mix.  
Lucrecia touched the smooth surface of the door with her palms and closed her eyes, trying to keep in check a sudden onset of protectiveness that commanded her to enter the room and take her baby, take him in her arms and never let go.  
"So we did it," She thought. "We did it, the Cetra's abilities are working. I can feel Sephiroth from distance."  
The Cetra's ability to "talk with spirits" was well known and confirmed by multiple sources, but what exactly did it mean, nobody knew. Some thought that Cetra had been able to communicate with each other through distance, others believed that they had been talking only with spirits of deceased. Now Lucrecia learned the truth: even the small amount of Cetra's cells allowed her to feel her son's presence. She closed her eyes, feeling her lips stretching in a smile. Whatever had happened, the baby was alive and well, and in time she would be with him.  
A few minutes later she made herself push away from the door and turned back to where she came from. Something inside her protested, reached out for the warmth left behind, urging her to go there, to take what belonged to her, take and run, - but she refused to listen to it.  
"Calm and professional," she reminded herself, "patient and rational. Simon is taking care of the baby. He knows better, there must be serious reasons to not allow me near Sephiroth, and _I should listen to him_."

The underground lab met her with its usual quiet noises and yellow lamp lights. The surgical table was cleaned, all tools put away. The side table where Simon was examining the baby was empty too, even the blue plastic sheets were gone. For a few minutes Lucrecia stood in front of the table, trying to remember more of Sephiroth's birth, but the few memories she had were obscured by fire, full of wind, unintelligible whispers and pain.  
Sighing, she ran her hand over the surface where her baby had been lying, as if trying to find the traces of his warmth. Was it there where he had drawn his first breath? Was he feeling her too, like she felt him? Was he lonely without her?  
Lucrecia could still feel him, like a small, but warm sun whose rays reached her through stone, and wood, and soil. It made her both happy and miserable, - he was so close, but she couldn't reach him.  
She leaned on the table, feeling a lump in her throat. "I need to convince Simon," She thought. "I need my son."  
"Our son," Whispered the empty air around her. Lucrecia looked around, but, of course, there was no one else in the lab. She shook her head, trying to clear it.  
"It's just lingering after-effects of Mako," She reassured herself. "Now that there's no injections anymore, I'll be better in no time."  
For some reason, believing her own words was difficult.

Her workstation was locked. She remembered locking it before leaving the lab to talk to Simon about... She frowned, trying to remember, what had she wanted to talk to him about. The memory was there, but, no matter how she tried, it eluded her. In the end, she sighed and turned to the matter at hand.  
Vincent's condition.  
She went to the Mako tank controls, checked on Vincent's vitals. Everything seemed to be in order. The darkness was still there under his skin, and his left arm was still disfigured. Automatically Lucrecia began to check the parameters for Materia and medication, and paused at the dosage of sedatives Vincent was receiving. It was significantly higher than she had set it. She frowned. Had Simon changed it? Why? She felt anger rising - how could he interfere again, after all he had done to Vincent? - and lowered the dosage.

She only just returned to working on the model, when she was interrupted by muffled thuds coming from the direction of Mako tank.

The creature Vincent turned into was awake again, fierce golden eyes blazing, claws striking at the transparent walls. It was fully transformed now, bigger and bulkier than its host was, skin dark, red wings flapping but failing to fully stretch in the small space. It looked like a monster. It was a monster - a monster that took Vincent from her.  
"Stop!" She shouted, running up to the tank and shaking her fists at Chaos in fury. "Leave him alone! Go away, you, monster, and leave him alone!"  
For a moment, Chaos hesitated, inclining its head to the side, as if trying to hear her words. For a tiny fraction of time, Lucrecia could swear its eyes became Vincent's warm brown instead of fiery yellow, but the moment passed and the monster began its struggles anew.  
It must have not reached its full strength yet, because, as much as it fought, the glass stayed intact, and in a few minutes after Lucrecia with trembling hands raised the dosage of sedatives to the higher value, Chaos went into slumber again. The darkness reluctantly left Vincent's right side, but now it was spread even more than before.

...

When Doctor Valentine and Lucrecia had been studying the legends and ancient texts, they had come to believe that the Planet's defence system truly existed; they'd found enough evidence in many sources. Grimoire had suggested to label the creatures that were parts of these systems with the name mentioned in one of the legends.  
Weapons of Gaia, - or simply Weapons.  
The myths about Chaos and Omega had been the first they had successfully deciphered; Grimoire had presumed there was much more of the Weapons to be found if one examined legends carefully and found the true meaning of them. Lucrecia's opinion on most of the issues concerning Weapons had been the same as his. But, while Doctor Valentine had thought that Weapons were created and controlled by the Planet itself, Lucrecia had felt it was too close to the beliefs of the small, radical part of the scientific society. These scientists believed that the Planet was not only alive, but sentient, and Mako was in fact the legendary Lifestream, "the river of souls flowing through the heart of Gaia", giving life to all living beings. Some of these scientists refused to work for Shin-Ra, some even had gone so far as leaving Midgar University after it had officially become Shin-Ra University.  
"It's just an irrational belief," She had once told Doctor Valentine. "It's not proven by anything."  
He had laughed and said, "You can say that about nearly any theory. In the beginning, most of them are just beliefs. That's what we are doing - looking for evidence, checking facts, separating the theories that are true from the ones that are not."  
"But, if this one is true, then... If the Planet is alive and Mako is Lifestream and it really is what makes living things alive... Then, mining it could be... dangerous?"  
"Yes, if this theory proved to be true, it would mean certain, hmmm, difficulties for us."  
Then, she had chosen to just ignore that theory, and even after everything that had happened she couldn't take it seriously. It was illogical, unproven, and therefore it wasn't worth any of her time. But more than anything, thinking about it made her uncomfortable. The Company, providing cheap and abundant Mako energy, was doing so much good for the humanity. If they abandoned it, how would they live? How would they work?  
And so, she instead accepted the idea that while the Weapons were certainly created by the Planet (the same way all Materia was created), they were controlled either by whomever was using their Materia, or by mechanisms similar to reflexes and instincts of animals. She simply wasn't able to believe in souls, spirits, Lifestream, - it all seemed too close to fairy tales. And besides, if Materia could house information models for spells and summons, why couldn't it contain also information models for reflexes and instincts? If something was moving and acting on its own, it didn't yet mean that it was something alive.

The experiment which had ended with Doctor Valentine's death had been the very first attempt to understand - and to harness - the power of Weapons. They had planned to use the Chaos-structured Mako on the Protomateria found in the Crystal Cave, - an unusual Materia, inert to any types of magic, unresponsive no matter what they had tried to do with it. In the end, they had assumed it was an empty container in which the Weapon's information model could be stored the same way as summons in Summon Materia. Whether they had been right or not remained unknown; after Grimoire's death, Lucrecia hadn't attempted to continue their work.

Simon's failed experiment on Vincent had given Lucrecia an opportunity to get farther in the study of Weapons than anyone before her. The sleeping man in the Mako tank, carrying inside himself an imprint of Chaos' information structure, was a proof of her achievements. She had made a breakthrough that worth more than what the whole BioWare team had done in several years.  
It was Doctor Crescent's greatest achievement, a triumph over everyone who considered her skills lacking and her ideas delusional, a straight and wide road to great professional heights. All she had dreamt of since she had been a child, and even more.  
Combing through the notes and compiling the model, Lucrecia found out that now all these things meant surprisingly little to her.

...

Later, Lucrecia blamed her exhaustion, and irritation with the contradictory results she received from the models, for the bad impression she made with Simon when he visited her in the underground lab.  
She just finished another iteration of the model, but from the very first lines it printed on the screen she understood that it was a failure again. Was it a valid reason for screaming and beating the innocent workstation with her fists? Probably not, but she was too annoyed to stop herself.  
And, of course, it was precisely the moment Simon chose to visit.

Ignoring her hysterical condition, he came up to her and looked at the screen over her shoulder. She hunched her shoulders and, closing her eyes, breathed deeply, trying to calm down.  
"Ah," he said after a moment, "I see. You are still working with it. Do you find it adequate?"  
"What do you mean?" She glanced at him and turned back towards the screen. His presence behind her was unnerving.  
"My specimen," He said. "The one with which we both experimented."  
"He is not a specimen," She gritted through clenched teeth. "He is Vincent Valentine. He was a Turk. He is a human."  
"I wouldn't be so sure of that now, Lucy," Simon chuckled softly, but, finally, moved away. "After what we did, I doubt it can still be considered a human."  
She clenched her fists, barely holding back an angry retort. "Calm down," She reminded herself, "be rational." Aloud, she asked only, "What do you want from me?"  
"I came to check up on you," He said. "As you gave birth recently, you shouldn't be left unattended."  
"Am I forbidden from working in the lab, then?"  
"No, no. You're free to do whatever you will. You're on a medical leave, though, so try to get more rest."  
"I- I'll try," She said. "Thank you."

After Simon left, Lucrecia slumped in her chair and put her head in her hands. She hoped her outburst didn't have too much of a negative impact on Simon's opinion of her mental health.  
She had to get a better grip on herself.

...

Two full days later, Lucrecia felt a slight hope that she might have found a way to solve the Vincent-Chaos problem.  
The problem didn't seem to lie in the physical world. The essence was as pure as it was possible, and Vincent's body was in a good enough condition, his brain patterns during sleep were normal.  
The change in his brain activity upon awakening was what had given her a clue.

It was a common knowledge that summons did not possess free will. They might have seemed to possess personalities of a certain kind, but couldn't choose how to act. A summoner did it for them. Even in the ill-fated Berserker Project, the transformation have been initiated by a host, not by a summon.  
Chaos, however, was acting on its own, not only commanding the host's body, but transforming it. It was unusual, but corresponded with her own theory about Weapons. After hours upon hours of studying the notes, running the models, reading through Doctor Valentine's analysis of legends, Lucrecia was almost sure that her mentor had been wrong. Weapons weren't controlled directly by anyone except themselves and their instincts.  
If so, then the reason of Vincent's current condition was the overpowering strength of Chaos' will, much stronger than will of a human, and what she needed was a way to suppress it.

In these two days, she left the lab only a handful of times. Eating meals was still just as unpleasant as it had been during the pregnancy, sleep was mostly avoiding her, and, besides, she wasn't willing to run into Simon. It wasn't going to add to the stability of her mind, which was shaky at best.  
But, at least, there was no more nightmares, no hallucinations, no disembodied voices. In her dreams, she was floating in the dark; far below her was a frozen sea, - large waves, forever stopped in mid-motion. In the dark depths below the frozen surface she could glimpse a huge sleeping creature, its outlines faintly glowing green. The sea was surrounded by myriads of crystal pillars, that went, curving slightly inwards, all the way up, joining at zenith, forming something a giant dome, and from outside of the dome a dim green light and a quiet song was coming.  
In these dreams, Lucrecia knew that there was no way through the crystal, that she was trapped inside, but the thought didn't frighten her. It felt right somehow. It felt safe.  
Sometimes, she saw a light between the frozen waves - a fire, and someone sitting beside it, - but when she tried to get closer, she immediately woke up.

On the third day, while she was compiling a model for a very promising experiment with Manipulate spell, Simon visited her again.  
She was finishing keying in the parameters when, unnoticed by her, he approached her from behind and, as the previous time, looked at the screen over her shoulder.  
"Another experiment?" He commented. "I see. What are you trying to do now?"  
Startled by his voice, Lucrecia jumped up and turned around.  
"Uh, Simon? W-what are you-"  
"You're using this fine specimen to... Hmmm... A very interesting experiment, indeed... Controlling Chaos... You're working on your thesis, I presume?"  
She felt her cheeks grow hot. Anger mixed with fear boiled up in her gut. How dared he come and assume things about her like this?  
"You're wrong!" She shouted, moving to stand between the screen and Hojo, trying to hide the text from his eyes. "He's not a specimen- not to me! You're wrong! I'm only trying to help! I'd never-"  
Simon chuckled.  
Lucrecia suddenly remembered her excitement when she had created the pure Chaos essence, her thoughts about how unlucky it was that she hadn't had more subjects to experiment on...  
"No, you're wrong," She whispered. Anger grew cold, died down, and guilt took its place. "He's never been... Not to me... I..."  
Simon shook his head, chuckling. "Well, as I said, once a scientist, always a scientist. Am I that wrong, Lucy?"  
"Is he right?" she thought as Simon, still chuckling, turned away and began walking to the exit. "Was it that necessary to use Chaos' essence? Did I do it because I care for Vincent, or because I wanted to prove myself?"  
"Was what I did to him better than death?"

A familiar sensation of vertigo overcame her; it shouldn't have been happening, she thought weakly, trying to shake it off. She wasn't receiving Mako injections anymore, there shouldn't have been any hallucinations, she...  
The lab around her was becoming blurry and unreal. Lights mixed and swirled, a kaleidoscope of yellow, and blue, and green. Wing sang in her ears. Lucrecia grasped the backrest of her chair, fighting to restore her balance. From a corner of her eye, she noticed a white shape in general direction of the entrance. For a moment, her sight cleared and she saw Simon standing there - white lab coat and pale skin a stark contrast with black hair, lips curling in a small, crooked smile. His eyes were narrowed, observing her intently.  
"Simon," She croaked, taking a step towards him. "H- help..."  
He didn't move an inch, only the knuckles of his fisted hands went white, and his mouth became a thin line.  
Her knee caught on the edge of the chair, and she fell, only just managing to prevent herself from planting face forward into the tiles of the floor.

She was aware that she was standing on all four, but in her mind she was falling. She could feel hard, smooth tiles under her palms and knees, could trace the rough edge of tile with her index finger, but her eyes didn't see any of it. Instead of the familiar walls and devices, she was surrounded by thick grey mist, falling through it - down, and down, and down.  
Suddenly, the mist disappeared, and Lucrecia cried out at the unexpected brightness.  
She was falling down from the sky towards the grey, cracked earth. Slowly spinning around, she glimpsed the far seashore - the waves were lazily licking at the white sand, small winged shapes - birds? aerial lizards? - were floating above the water surface. From the sea, a mountain chain stretched, gray and black rocks towering over each other. At the foothills she could see forests - or, either, what was left of them, - a dead, grey mass of withered trunks and branches with rare spots of green where some of the trees were still standing alive.  
"The world is dying," Whispered the wind, turning her farther around and, looking up from the lifeless ground, she saw a big, tall mountain far away beyond the plains.  
The world shuddered. The plain and the mountains shook. Somewhere down below a group of small blue lizards jumped out of their hideout under a big boulder and froze, looking at the mountain on horizon. Lucrecia felt it too, a weird cold feeling coming from there. Something was being born there, something cold, and ancient, and dangerous, ready to push the world to its inevitable fate.  
The top of the faraway mountain disappeared in a cloud of smoke. The world shuddered again. Lizards rushed to escape, but Lucrecia, caught by the wind, was pulled towards the shadow that emerged from the smoke. It was approaching with a great speed, and where it passed, the last sprouts of life were withering and crumbling into dust, letting out green tendrils of mist that flew towards the sea.  
And over the sea, somewhere far, far away, a giant glowing shape was rising.  
In a few moments, the shadow was so close to Lucrecia that she could see it clearly, - a winged demon whose skin was covered in dark scales, a demon with leathery black wings and several horns on its head.  
Its eyes were gold, blazing with fury, and looking into them, she saw only death.  
"No!" She screamed, trying to get away, and was thrown into the grey mist again.  
When it cleared, she was back on the lab floor.

For a few minutes she stayed where she was, simply lying with eyes closed and breathing.  
"What does this mean?" She thought. "Why am I having hallucinations?"  
She hadn't received a single injection since the last one, almost two weeks ago. She had expected the symptoms to disappear as soon as Mako left her system.  
"Probably, it has something to do with Cetra's cells, not Mako." She thought. "Probably, all this time I was getting information from the Planet, like the Cetra could... only, I'm lacking the ability to properly process it. But, if I can, does that mean that Sephiroth..."  
"Simon!" She exclaimed aloud, opening her eyes, but he was not there. Lucrecia sat up and turned around. Simon was nowhere to be seen; but if he understood the same that she did, leaving her alone and checking on Sephiroth instead was the right thing to do. They were connected. If she felt that bad, what, then, happened to her baby?

As soon as her muscles were obeying her again, she left the lab and slowly, step by step, made her way to the upper lab, where Simon set up the ICU. It was locked; she knocked and waited for Simon to answer. While she was waiting, their earlier conversation was replaying itself in her mind, - his words, his tone, her own responses...  
Something was off. He seemed... different. Too distant. Almost cruel. Before, he have been that way mostly while talking with Hollander. Sometimes, he could have been like that with other co-workers. On very rare occasions, even with Ifalna and Professor Faremis. But not with Lucrecia. Never with her. Not even when they had been students.  
And it all was her own fault, she thought. Why couldn't she control herself better?  
Lucrecia sighed. She was afraid that proving her sanity now was going to be much more difficult than she had hoped.

Finally, Simon opened the door and stood there, blocking the entrance.  
"Is Sephiroth okay?" She asked quickly, afraid that he would simply close the door without listening to her.  
"Yes," He said.  
"Was there any... changes in his condition while I was having a, uh, hallucination?"  
He rubbed the bridge of his nose, adjusted his glasses, and said, "Yes. From the readings, I'd say, he was having a dream."  
"So we are connected, me and him."  
"It's one of the possibilities. Or you both were reacting to something we can't detect yet. We don't have proper equipment here, so it's impossible to tell."  
She hesitated, unsure if she should tell him that she could feel the baby. Logically, she should, she knew... but didn't want to.  
"Professor Faremis is returning," Simon added after a moment. "I've received a telegram from him. In five or six weeks he will arrive, and I think, we should convince him to move Sephiroth to Midgar as soon as possible."  
"Y-yes, we should talk to him," She said, thinking instead about Vincent. If she failed to help him, what would happen then? How were they going to hide him from the others? What would happen to him after they left for Midgar?

Only when she was back in the lab, she remembered that she didn't tell Simon about her ability to sense the baby's location. Sighing, she promised herself to tell everything to Professor Gast when he returned. Him, she could trust.


	9. Chapter 9

By the time Lucrecia reached the top of the cliff, her friend was already there. Standing with her eyes closed against the orange light of the setting sun, her head tipped back, Ifalna was quietly murmuring something - a prayer? Unwilling to disturb her, Lucrecia bowed down, resting the palms of her hands on her knees and took several deep, calming breaths, looking as the drops of sweat fell down from her flushed face; the stone steps were too steep, the air too thin and the weather too hot - or, probably, she'd spent too much time, lately, in labs and libraries and not nearly enough outside.

Eventually her heart rate slowed down and her legs stopped trembling. She straightened, grimacing at the cooling sweat covering her whole body, and looked around. The sun was hovering just above the mountain peaks on the western horizon. Hot, dry wind that had been constantly blowing all day long, finally stopped, and the blades of Bugenhagen’s wind turbine went still. In the silence of the slumbering world the first crickets were starting their nightly songs in the withered grass, lit orange by last rays of sun. The observatory sat at the western edge of the cliff like a giant mushroom with thick grey stem and small cap; thin smoke was rising from the chimney of a tiny house that stood near the observatory. At least, Bugenhagen seemed to be home. It would've been too bad if they climbed all that way for nothing.

Ifalna was still in the same position, unmoving silhouette against the orange sunlight. Lucrecia walked closer, purposely shuffling her feet through the gravel. No reaction. Lucrecia stopped beside her friend and cleared her throat. Ifalna flinched.

"Oh!" She exclaimed. "Sorry! I was... uh..." She carded her hand through her dark curls, looking around, as if just woken up, disoriented. "…Listening," she finished at last.

"To what?" Lucrecia asked. "Crickets?"

"Mm, no, I-" Ifalna was - blushing? Her cheeks were quickly becoming nearly the same color as her red top. "To the- to the song of the Planet." Her eyes went wide and alarmed. "Oh, er, I mean, the Planet's song Bugenhagen described - you remember his book, right? That's what I meant. I thought maybe I could hear it here, he said it’s like, louder in some special places, and maybe here-"

Laughing, Lucrecia hugged her friend. "Alright, alright! And what the Planet was singing about?"

Ifalna shot her a brief shy glance and looked towards the sunset again. "I don't really understand," she said softly, "but it was... beautiful."

"Maybe I should try too," Lucrecia said and closed her eyes, trying to focus on the sounds around. She could hear at least four separate crickets, faint voices from the lower level, shrill cries of a bird from above, and her own breathing. In no way all that could be called a song.

When she gave up and opened her eyes, she was met by Ifalna's curious gaze.

"Well," Ifalna said, "did you hear… anything… interesting?"

"No," she said.

"Nothing at all?"

"Well, crickets, and voices, and a bird. That's all I heard."

"Okay," Ifalna sighed, looking a little disappointed, but also maybe a little relieved, and gestured to the house. "Let's go meet Bugenhagen, then?"

From up close the house, paradoxically, seemed even smaller. Its sand-grey stone walls were covered in thin cracks and withered vines, and the rusty, crooked metal roof looked like it was barely holding in place. Not for the first time Lucrecia wondered what a scientist like Bugenhagen was doing there, in a near wilderness so far from all civilization, when he could easily have had all the University's resources.

The tiny windows were dark, and nobody answered the knock, but it didn't faze Ifalna. "He's probably in the library," she said, opened the door (which protested with a high, grating whine) and disappeared inside.

"Library?" thought Lucrecia. "How could a library fit in this tiny hut?"

She peered into the house tentatively. As she suspected, there was only one small room inside: a sink and a fridge, a quilt-covered bed in the corner next to the fridge, a table with a couple of ancient-looking wooden chairs in the middle of the room. Rough stone floor was partly covered by a dusty red carpet with a barely visible white and yellow ornament. On a windowsill above the sink a single flowerpot stood, a withered stalk sticking out of it and dry brown leaves strewn around.

Ifalna was nowhere in sight. Lucrecia stepped into the room and called, keeping her voice low, "Iffie!" - receiving no answer. She went farther, glancing around. The room was empty.

“Iffie!” she called again, louder this time. “Professor Bugenhagen! Are you here?”

She looked under the table, the bed, even opened the fridge, but, of course, no one was hiding there. Ifalna simply disappeared. Lucrecia bowed down to check under the bed for the second time – the room was dark, after all, maybe she simply hadn’t noticed something on the first try?

“What are you still doing here?”

Lucrecia flinched, startled, and hit the back of her head on the bedframe. She straightened quickly, rubbing the sore spot, turned around. Ifalna was standing beside the table. In those few minutes she’d changed out of her red top and shorts into a long blue dress, and her backpack was gone. Lucrecia wondered if Ifalna brought the dress with her, and, looking with disgust at her own blouse and skirt, sweat-soaked and dusty, regretted she didn’t think to do the same.

“Sister,” Ifalna said impatiently, “why aren’t you in the library?”

“Where…” Lucrecia began, but Ifalna turned around and walked to the previously empty wall. Now, there was a door – large, made of polished dark wood, it seemed completely out of place in this simple room. The door was slightly ajar, and from behind it she could glimpse rows of shelves and pale blue light.

Ifalna glanced back at her and rolled her eyes. “Come on,” she said, “everyone’s already there and waiting for us.”

Frowning, Lucrecia slowly began to walk after  Ifalna. Behind the door, indeed, was a library, - she was pretty sure it was the old University library; she’d spent hours and hours there, leafing through heavy tomes and making notes. Lucrecia hurried after Ifalna, determined to ask her what was happening, but no matter how fast she was walking, Ifalna was faster.

For some time – Lucrecia couldn’t say how long – they walked the narrow straight path between towering bookshelves filled with thousands of books. The light grew brighter and brighter, and finally they emerged into the reading hall. All the reading tables were gone; instead, in the middle of the hall there stood a weird looking mechanism – shining crystals and moving spheres, emitting bright light and low hum. Bugenhagen was in front of it, muttering under his breath and, from time to time, adjusting one crystal or another. Professor Faremis, Doctor Simmons and Hollander were standing to the side, talking among themselves in hushed voices.

“Elder,” Ifalna said, interrupting their conversation, “I brought the Priest. She is my sister; you can trust her like you trust me.”

“Excellent,” said Gast, turning to Lucrecia. “Thank you for coming. There were very troubling news and very unusual readings and we need your help.”

To her surprise, Lucrecia found her mouth moving on its own accord, asking, “How can I help you, Elder?”

Gast, sighing, adjusted his glasses. “There was a string of accidents in the village of Pine Forest, near White Moon Haven,” he said. “During the past two weeks, seven villagers claimed to have seen spirits of the people they knew where dead. Shortly after, each of those villagers has become violent, and in a matter of days they all went completely uncontrollable. Two were killed, both in self-defense; one disappeared without a trace, and the remaining four died. We believed it to be a case of obstructed flow and subsequent possession by unsent spirits, but the local priest doesn’t confirm it, and readings from the streams in the area are also normal. What concerns me even more is that we cannot seem to detect the residual energy from the deceased – it’s dissipated completely, which should not be possible so soon after their deaths.”

“When was the most recent incident?” Lucrecia asked.

“Two last deaths, six and four hours ago. We just received the news. No residual energy from them, either.”

“Yes,” she agreed, “you are right, this is indeed unusual. May I look at the readings myself?”

Gast gestured to the strange mechanism and followed Lucrecia there.

“Everything is in working order,” said Bugenhagen, turning away from the machine and facing them. “I don’t understand why we can’t detect them.”

“That’s why I am here,” Lucrecia said, bending over and peering into the mass of shining crystals. The vortex of colors and sounds flooded her, and for a moment the picture swayed and rippled. When it passed, she found herself standing in front of an unfamiliar grey-haired, brown-eyed man, in a white room – white floor, white walls, white ceiling, a window with nothing behind it but opaque grey fog. Lucrecia blinked, and the room reshaped itself into the familiar library again.

To her own surprise, she was right in the middle of saying something.

“…not even a trace. It’s like they were completely erased from existence.”

“What could have done that?” Doctor Simmons asked. Lucrecia shrugged.

“I don’t know. If you asked me ten minutes ago if that’s even *possible*-”

The library flickered around her, changing into the white room and back. Professor Faremis and Doctor Simmons were saying something, and Lucrecia felt her own lips moving, but could not hear anything over the high-pitched whine in her ears. The world shuddered and swayed, the whine went even louder, then changed tone and speed, gathering strength, until a song, _a prayer_ , hit her like a wave – “Mother of Gods, bring the fire, bring salvation,” – and the library was washed away.

Lucrecia jolted awake, pushing up from the hard surface of the table. Her ears were still ringing with the deafening pulse of the prayer - “Mother of Gods, Mother of Gods,” and she shook her head, trying to clear her mind. Her heart was beating too fast, and she didn’t seem to get enough air in her lungs; something was wrong, something was _really_  wrong and she couldn’t calm down enough to understand _what_ , exactly, it was. The lab was very quiet. She rubbed her eyes, and was surprised to find a Materia piece still clutched in her hand. She frowned at the semi-transparent white orb, trying to focus. Had she fallen asleep without even noticing?

Lucrecia squinted at the clock. It was a quarter past midnight. She hadn’t even slept for half an hour, but it felt like something had drastically changed.

Something was missing.

She winced at the throbbing pain in her temples that flared with each beat of her heart, and tried to rub her temple, only to find out that she was still holding the Materia.

“Something is missing,” she thought again, squinting against the light that, she knew, was weak enough, but seemed too bright. “What is it?”

The unusual silence was disturbing. Usually, she could swear, the lab wasn’t quite that quiet. There always was some kind of a low, but persistent background noise, but now it was-

Then it hit her, and she gasped, terrified. It wasn’t a noise that was missing. The warmth she’d always felt, this constant awareness of the spot Sephiroth was occupying in the world around her… it all was gone. She searched desperately with her eyes, scanning the ceiling – as if she could see through it – but, of course, found nothing but stones.

And if the connection wasn’t there anymore-

She pushed away from the table, jumping to her feet and turning hastily to the door, knocking her chair over in a blind panic.

“No, no, no,” she whispered, shaking all over, trying to run but capable only of unsteady, too-slow steps. “Simon, what did you do, please, no, not _him_ , too, please-“

She tripped over the threshold and nearly fell, dropping the Materia; it rolled to the side and disappeared under a table, but Lucrecia hardly even noticed it. In a heartbeat, she was flooded with low hum of multitude of whispers, and doubled over, clutching at her ears; but then she froze, wide-eyed, because Sephiroth was _back_. He was there again, right in the spot where he’d always been, and the instant relief sent her crushing to the floor. Lucrecia curled in a ball and wept with relief, basking in the sudden warmth.

Still overwhelmed, she barely noticed what was happening around her, when a hand landed on her shoulder and Simon’s concerned voice asked, “Lucy, what happened?”

A hot wave of rage flooded her, and she pushed his hand off, shouting, “What did you do to him?”

“Nothing!” Simon answered, holding his hands up. “I was doing exactly nothing; well, if you don’t count composing a message for headquarters. What did _you_  do?”

“I…” She hesitated. “Something happened to Sephiroth?”

“He became very agitated, about half an hour ago. His vitals were all over the place. Then, twenty minutes later, it stopped. What were you doing here, Lucy?”

She glanced at the table the Materia disappeared under. “I’m… not really sure. I was examining the rare Materia pieces and… I think... I passed out.”

Simon sighed and stood up, walked to her work table. She hated that he could read her notes, but, too weak to even raise her arms, she was forced to limit herself to glaring daggers at his bent back. A few minutes later Simon, humming, walked to her, raising his brows at her glare.

“Interesting,” he commented conversationally. “Your, ah, musings about the nature of, um, _relationship_  between a summoner and a summon… Very philosophic - I’d even say, poetic... But how, exactly, is this going to help you with your little problem? And the terminology you are using… _Spiritual energy_ , Lucy, really?”

“I didn’t expect _you_ to understand,” she muttered through clenched teeth.

Simon chuckled a little, turning around again and walking towards the Mako tank. Gathering all her strength, Lucrecia climbed to her feet slowly, surprised to find out that her strength was already returning.

“If you are done insulting my research,” she said quietly, “please tell me how Sephiroth is feeling now.”

“He’s fine, as far as I can tell,” Simon said distractedly, looking over the body inside the tank. “I suppose, the link between you two was temporarily broken when you blacked out and that was the reason for his distress.”

“Yes, you’re probably right,” Lucrecia agreed, stealing another glance at the table where the Materia was hiding. “May I see him?”

“No.”

“I only want to make sure that he is okay,” she said, trying to keep her voice level. “I won’t try anything, Simon, I promise, won’t even come near him. I just want to see him, just this one time. Please…”

“You know I can’t risk it.”

“No, I don’t,” she said bitterly, “I don’t know _anything_. You keep accusing me of doing - _something_ , - but won’t even tell what it was. He’s my son, too, I have the right to see him. I-“

“ _You_ ,” Simon interrupted her, turning away from the Mako tank, “where Sephiroth is concerned, have only those rights I _allowed_  you to have.” His eyes flashed with something – anger? Resentment? “And right now, you should be thankful I allowed you to stay as close as you are, in this _house_.”

“So you’ll just take him away?” She said, shaking, feeling her voice break over the last word. “Never allow me to see him? You were never going to let me be with him? That’s what you’re saying?”

Hojo didn’t answer; he began to turn away again, but Lucrecia stopped him, stepping close and catching him by the lapels of his white lab coat.

“You can’t just take him away,” she insisted. His face was blurring before her; she felt tears prickling at her eyes. “You can’t, Simon, please. I’m his mother! He _needs_ me! Let me see him, please, just once… Just once!”

He was looking at her impassively while she begged him, again and again, jerking him a little by lapels. “Let me, Simon, please, let me see him, let me! He’s mine, not yours! Mine! He needs me, I have to take care of him! Just let me, let me! Let me! Let me see him!” She shouted, shaking him. The fabric of his lab coat gave, and she was left with two scraps of white cloth in her hands. Simon staggered, barely keeping his balance.

Lucrecia looked between the pieces in her hands and Simon’s face. “I- I’m so-“ she began, but he interrupted her.

“You see,” he said, calm and cold, “you are unstable. You can’t control yourself. I won’t risk Sephiroth’s life by letting you anywhere near him. If you want to take care of him, take care of yourself first. When was the last time you took a break from your project? Go get some sleep so you won’t pass out again.”

With that he walked past her and out of the lab, leaving her speechless.

…

For a long time, Lucrecia was standing there, in front of the Mako tank, looking absently at her own hands. What had gotten into her? She needed to keep calm. She really needed to…

“What, exactly?” She thought bitterly. “Simon isn’t going to let me see my son, he made it clear enough. He’s just going to keep him away from me, and there’s nothing I can do to convince him that I won’t harm Sephiroth.”

“I won’t harm him,” she thought. “I’m completely sure about it. I’d never want anything bad to happen to him. I know this. I _know_.”

“Then why Simon so strongly believes the opposite?”

…

It was nearing two in the morning by the time Lucrecia finally came to her senses and went to rescue the Materia from the dusty corner under the table. Suspecting that the reason for her blackout was this particular Materia and not general exhaustion, she did not dare touch it with bare hands again; instead, she fished it out using pincers and immediately put it back into the box. The Materia didn’t look any different from before; light gray and translucent, it laid there, innocently shimmering under the artificial lights.

It was the piece from the Crystal Cave, Protomateria. Lucrecia could remember taking it from the box, actually just to put it aside because she had been looking for another piece… and that was the last thing she remembered. Apparently, she had blacked out right at the moment she had made contact with it, and then had watched the weirdest dream.

The first half of the dream had, mostly, been a memory of Lucrecia’s first visit to Cosmo Canyon. But Bugenhagen had been home then, and there hadn’t been any additional doors in his tiny house. They had talked over sweet herbal tea, and left after the sunset, and spent the rest of the night near the bonfire.

She smiled, remembering Ifalna’s embarrassment over the “Planet’s song”. Iffie was like that sometimes, - shy, or embarrassed, or scared of the most unexpected and trivial things… Lucrecia’s heart clenched painfully over those fond memories that now seemed to have happened a lifetime ago.

“Just a few weeks,” she reminded herself. “Just a little longer, and I won’t be alone anymore.”

The second half of the dream, strangely, also felt like a memory. Lucrecia could swear that the scene she had witnessed had really happened, even if she knew for sure that it had never happened in _her_  life.

“Maybe it was a connection to Cetra’s memories,” she mused. “If Gast was right, Sephiroth should be able to communicate with their spirits. If they even _exist_. Maybe I, too, can do it? But why this, some random memory of a – what it even was, an epidemic of some sorts? A ghost story? And what’s with the… residual spirit energy? And a device for… what – finding spirits?”

She sat back in the chair, took her notebook and a pencil and tried to draw the crystal device from the dream. To her surprise, she remembered it very clearly, each and every small detail, which was indeed unusual for a regular dream. She squinted at the drawing, trying to think of where, exactly, she could have seen something like that. The only place that came in mind was Crystal Cave with its glowing druses, but they weren’t exactly _devices_.

The screen of her workstation was blinking at her with a green cursor; for some time she sat, staring at it, torn between the usual impulse to write down the whole incident and the reluctance of giving Hojo even more information.

In the end, she wrote down only the general account of the events, without specifying which Materia had caused the reaction.


	10. Chapter 10

The next several days Lucrecia had spent, testing her previous theories and finding them depressingly accurate. Nothing had worked; she had been right in her assumption that both “blocking” and “manipulating” spells affected the caster and not the Materia itself, and therefore were useless.

Meanwhile, January had given way to February; the snow covering the ground was melting rapidly under the bright sun, but winter hadn't given up yet: the winds were blowing strong and cold from the heights, making grey mountain sparrows fluff their tiny feathers and sit tighter together on the thin branches, and filling the Mansion with groans and moans of tired old wood and faint whistling of wind coming through minuscule cracks under sills or between glass and window frames.

By the end of the first week of February Lucrecia had tested everything she could think of and ran out of ideas. Chaos was quickly developing resistance to drugs; soon enough the doses would reach above the maximum. Although exceeding it, she supposed, couldn't really harm Vincent, considering his altered biology, she still preferred to avoid it if possible.

In those days that were lonely and seemed to last too long, but passed by far too quickly, she often found herself daydreaming, imagining Professor Faremis and Ifalna returning, them all moving to Midgar, herself finally holding Sephiroth, carrying him in her arms (certainly Gast would believe her good intentions!), living with him in their own room in Shin-Ra main labs… But every time she let her mind wander freely, the images of Midgar, in the end, always disappeared, replaced by snow and deep, dark, faraway caves, where she and Sephiroth would’ve been safe, hidden from everyone, until he grew up and grew strong.

Several times during those days Lucrecia had caught herself near the door, or in the middle of the tunnel, or even as far as the spiral staircase leading into the Mansion, - without clear recollection of how she’d ended up there. It had always been a reaction to the sensation of Sephiroth calling for her through their link; she didn’t think that it was intentional on his part. Most likely, in these moments he had been hungry, or lonely, or in pain, and called out to her reflexively, but the way she had responded instantly, without any kind of conscious thought before reacting, frightened her.

“Simon was right, I really need to try and sleep more often,” she would mutter to herself, trying to calm down after those episodes, but never followed her own advice. Simon, hovewer, didn’t let her work for days without sleep anymore; every night he would come to the lab and send her to her room with explicit orders to get some rest. She tried to comply, rarely managing more than an hour of sleep, and then quietly sneaked back into the lab.

...

On February 8th, after a few days of pointless combing through all previous research, Lucrecia decided to look into the Protomateria again. The idea had been on her mind for some time; the Protomateria seemed to be a blocker of sorts, - at least, it had efficiently blocked her connection with Sephiroth, if not all of her Cetra-related abilities.

But she needed to have some measure of control over the process, this time. She didn’t want the blockade to last too long and scare Sephiroth again.

At eight in the evening she placed Protomateria in a makeshift sling over her table, marked time and cautiously touched Materia’s exposed side from below.

…

Accompanied again by Ifalna, Lucrecia was walking along a winding stone path that seemed to be carved into a mountain. On their right stood a colonnade of white marble pillars; somewhere from behind them she could hear sounds of a waterfall. She didn’t know where they were going, but her legs were moving quickly and steadily, and she didn’t have a choice except to allow them to carry her. Ifalna was silent, this time, and when Lucrecia tried to ask her where they were going, she discovered that it was impossible to say a word.

The path ended in a large round room that was carved deeper into the same mountain; Lucrecia entered the room, only to find out that all the others were already there. Professors Faremis and Gaeb, doctor Simmons and, to her surprise, Hojo, were gathered around a large semi-transparent hemisphere, a screen of sorts, Lucrecia decided, because inside it was a slowly moving picture of a snowy forest. The image was swaying wildly from side to side, as if the person carrying the camera had trouble walking.

As Lucrecia, following Ifalna, came closer to the group, a human figure appeared on the screen, - a young woman in a thin, short green tunic. The picture stopped swaying, tilted to one side. The woman moved towards the camera; her lips parted, but there was no sound.  A moment later the screen flashed several times (bright pink, fading to white), and the picture disappeared.

“And this is all we got from the last expedition,” dr. Simmons said. “They couldn’t get any closer than western slopes of the Knowlespeak, as you see.”

“So it still spreads,” Gaeb turned away from the hemisphere and rubbed a hand over his forehead. “And fast enough. It’s been what – three months, four? – since we lost Haven?”

“I don’t understand,” Hollander muttered, “exactly _how_  it spreads. We quarantined the area. There’s no one there. The Plague causes quick death, - two weeks at maximum, right, Doctor? So _why_  is it still spreading when there’s no possible carriers?”

Dr. Simmons sighed. “Well,” she said, “I may have a few theories on how it could be possible. First of all-“

“First of _all_ ”, interrupted Hojo, who until that moment was still looking into the foggy depths of the crystal sphere, “we may be wrong about the _nature_  of the thing we are dealing with. We assumed it is a virus or a bacteria, parasitic in nature, incapable of surviving – or, at the very least, of being active, - outside of the host in such suboptimal conditions. What if we were wrong?”

“Well, then, what could it be?” Hollander asked, frowning at Hojo. “One of your mythical _celestial intruders_?”

Hojo shrugged. “Possible.”

“You got no evidence, _colleague_ ,” Hollander said sarcasticaly. “Remind me, how many years have you spent trying to find any traces of anything that didn’t originate from here? And what, exactly, have you found?” He pointed a finger at Hojo. “Nothing. Absolutely _nothing_.”

“We could try and capture one of the infected, as I asked you, Elders, to do, repeatedly, since the Plague began,” Hojo said, now turning to face dr. Simmons, “and what was your answer?”

“We could not risk bringing it here!” Sarah exclaimed. “How could we, not knowing how to stop it from spreading?!”

“Excuses,” Hojo smirked. “Always excuses. You all are too cowardly-“

“And you are far too _reckless_ -“

“Enough,” Professor Faremis stopped the quarrel with a single word. “We don’t have time for this." He turned to Hollander. "Could you, please, check if last Scan found anything of interest?” Hollander nodded mutely and walked away. “Now, you know how I feel about your theories,” he raised his hand, stopping Hojo who was ready to retort, “but you are right. We have no certainty as for the nature or origin of what we are dealing with, quarantine doesn’t work, and, if data from the Scans is correct, the Wound also is not healing as fast as it should given the flow around it. However,” he said after a brief pause during which everyone looked at him with varying degrees of surprise, “Doctor is right too, we cannot bring the Plague anywhere near the Library. It is simply too dangerous. So, if anyone has any ideas, please, go ahead.”

 “I studied all attempts at stopping the Plague,” Ifalna said, “and now that I think about it… Maybe he is right, Elder.”

“What do you mean, he’s right?” Dr. Simmons asked, glancing between her and Hojo.

“The origin point of the Plague was Blueforest village. The very first two victims were a mother and a son who went into the Wound merely a few hours after the impact. They claimed to have seen someone in there-“

“We all know this,” Dr. Simmons interrupted impatiently, “get to the point, please.”

“Yes, sorry. What I noticed is that Plague seems to be, uh, _attracted_  to the places rich with spirit energy. We already learned that, unlike any other disease, Plague cannot be cured using magic; using it only leads to faster deterioration and death. The same happens to the victims living in natural high-energy areas. In low-energy areas, however, all the cases of Plague are imported.”

“So, you’re saying that we are dealing with a creature that feeds on spiritual energy?” Gast asked, taking off his glasses and rubbing the bridge of his nose. “This is biologically impossible. Living creatures can produce spiritual energy, but not consume it. It is one of the basic rules of life.”

 “This is what I’m talking about!” Hojo interjected. “Rules! You’re too limited, too afraid of even imagining that evolution could go completely different way!-“

Gast sighed. “This _different way_  would only lead to the Planet’s death. No spiritual energy, no life, no food for your hypothetical creature… No hypothetical creature, as a result.”

“Well, it seems this, as you put it, _hypothetical_  creature has found a way to get more food, and now it may very _non-hypothetically_ feed on us! So let’s listen to what our Summoner has to say. Unless that was all?”

“Not yet,” Ifalna answered calmly. “When spiritual energy was used with intent to harm the most violent of Plague victims, fire and ice were the most effective elements. We cannot burn the whole area around the Wound, but we can alter the energy flow so that it kept the area frozen and thus preventing the Plague from spreading.”

“And who would do it?” Dr. Simmons asked. “The process could only be initiated from the very center of the area, as close to the origin point as possible, and when it’s started-“

“Whoever did it, even if not infected by then, would be deep-frozen there with the Plague,” Hojo finished. “Well, who is willing to be our sacrifice?”

Everyone fell silent.

Lucrecia felt her body moving forward, and her mouth speaking, “As a Priest, redirecting and altering the flow is my specialty and my duty. I will go.”

…

This time, there was no flashing images and no songs or prayers; the dream stopped abruptly and Lucrecia found herself sitting in the same exact pose as before the experiment started. Her right hand fell away from the Protomateria and was now lying at the tabletop. A glance at the clock confirmed that the exposure time was also much shorter, - less than three minutes had passed since the experiment began.

The void inside, where the connection to Sephiroth should have been, nearly sent Lucrecia into panic again, but she ground her teeth and made herself wait, looking at the blinking dot of the electronic clock. One, two, three seconds…

The whispers washed over her, making her shiver and cover her ears, and the warmth of the revived link bloomed inside her chest. She automatically marked time and let herself slump in the chair, closing her eyes and sobbing with relief.

She was right, at least partially; Protomateria blocked at least some of her Cetra-related abilities, although it also provoked very strange dreams. Anyway, it seemed to be worth a try.

…

Later that night, trying (and failing) to sleep in her room, she found herself thinking of the dream she had under the influence of Protomateria. Something about it seemed weirdly familiar, but she could not remember what exactly.

Finally falling asleep, she remembered what it was - _Knowlespeak_ , a Cetran name for a mountain in the Northern continent. “So it was about something real, after all,” she thought, smiling, before falling into a dreamless sleep.

In the morning, eager to try the new idea, she completely forgot about the Knowlespeak. The dream, though unusual and interesting, was far from being her main focus, and, between planning the new experiment and trying to ignore the constant pull of the link to Sephiroth, she didn’t even remember to write it down into her journal.

…

From Lucrecia’s experience, for the Protomateria to work it needed to be in contact with skin, so the first experiment was just that, - bring it in contact with unconscious Vincent for a short period of time, see if anything happens.

But first of all, she needed a way to know for sure if something happened, and the “Cetra dreams”, as she called them, gave her an idea of how to do it.

As every Materia researcher, Lucrecia knew non-intrusive, non-disruptive methods of studying it; one of the most reliable and safe ones was the so-called "Corona scan", which, by examining the aura emitted by a Materia, allowed to make very precise conclusions on its properties without actually activating it (as long as it was something known).  The Mansion wasn’t equipped for working with Materia, but she knew how to assemble a simple Corona Scanner, using parts available to her.

The assembling process took a whole day; while working on it, Lucrecia caught herself thinking of Simon’s reaction if he saw what she was doing. He would have, most likely, laughed and insulted her intelligence again. Everyone and their chocobo knew that living creatures didn’t possess Mako auras, and Vincent, thanks Phoenix, was still alive.

But the entity co-inhabiting his body was close enough to a summon that the probability of it giving out a Mako aura was high enough to at least try and check it, and so Lucrecia took a screwdriver and a box of Yinsen M-12 sensors, and set to the task.

That evening she left the lab early, unwilling to let Simon look at her work and listen to his remarks. He was descending the stairs when she met him; he turned around wordlessly, and she followed him to her room. Neither said anything. Probably, Lucrecia thought, making herself comfortable under the covers, there simply was no words left to say between them.

…

Next morning she finished the sensor array and tested it; as expected, there was an aura around Vincent, - or, rather, around a certain point in his chest where, she supposed, most of the Chaos structures were gathered. Relatively small and spherical, aura didn’t match the contours of his body, instead overlapping with it.

At 17:00 Lucrecia stopped the medication briefly and observed how, almost immediately, the aura began to expand, taking more of Vincent’s body and changing shape. After a few minutes of observation she started the medication again.

Everything was ready for the main event.

She put on the gloves and reached for the box with rare Materia. She opened the cover, and was cautiously pulling the Protomateria out of it, when she heard a sound of glass being scratched. Glancing back over her shoulder, she saw that Chaos was waking again; the maximum dose of dugs seemed to have stopped working.

She quickly took the Protomateria and turned to the Mako tank, but before she could take a single step, Chaos threw all its weight at the wall of the tank. Lucrecia jumped in surprise and fear, losing her hold on the Materia; it fell down and rolled across the floor, disappearing under another table.

To her surprise, Chaos stopped its struggles for a moment, watching the Materia, but, as soon as it was hidden, the monster resumed its attack on the glass walls.

"Stop!" She shouted, stepping closer to the Mako tank. "Leave Vincent alone, do you hear me? Stop this! Go to sleep!"

This time, though, Chaos paid no attention to what was happening outside. In a quick and strong attack, the monster slammed both of its hands at the glass, nearly breaking it. It should have been impossible, but there it was: hairline fractures running across the wall where Chaos struck it. Lucrecia, frightened, took a step back, and Chaos prepared to lunge at the wall again, but hesitated, its gaze fixed on something to the right of where she was standing.

Lucrecia heard a sound from behind her and, glancing over her shoulder, saw Grimoire Valentine's semi-transparent form standing there, looking just like he had been on the day of his death.

Chaos froze in place.

At Doctor Valentine's feet, something rolled slowly forward, something small and round, glowing bright blue. The scientist smiled at Lucrecia, his eyes kind and sad, and disappeared, but the blue light remained.

Lucrecia cautiously stepped closer to the glowing object and crouched to take a look at it. To her surprise, it was the Protomateria, only now it wasn't foggy anymore. It was clear and bright, glowing slightly, and inside it tiny multi-colored particles were swirling in galaxy-like shapes.

“It’s awake,” came a thought. “Chaos' proximity woke it up. It's not the time yet.”

She glanced back at the Mako tank. The monster was unmoving, its golden eyes trained on her, following her every motion. Without looking away, she reached towards Protomateria, and Chaos growled, low and menacing, making the glass vibrate.

A moment later, her fingers touched the Materia. Chaos froze in place. Lucrecia also froze; whispers surrounded her again, and while she could still feel Sephiroth’s warm presence, those sensations were strangely detached, as if they belonged to someone else. Gone was the constant pull towards the baby; for the first time in weeks she didn’t feel the overwhelming need to be close to him. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, allowing herself a few minutes of rest.

Too soon she was interrupted by clock beeping the 15-minute mark. Slowly she straightened and walked up to the Mako tank. Putting Protomateria in the container, she placed it inside the tank and moved towards Vincent’s body. The reverse transformation began when the Materia was only a few centimeters away from him. The wings disappeared, as did the horns. The eyes closed. The black withdrew from his skin, back to its core.

Lucrecia observed the process in awe. "All this time," she thought, "the solution was right here, but I found it only by accident."

Letting go of the Protomateria was surprisingly difficult; she had to brace herself before finally making herself move her hand away. For now, she left the small container attached to Vincent’s shoulder, although she still had to find more permanent solution. An attempt to stop medication again proved that Chaos wasn’t completely blocked; it seemed that to maximize its effect, Protomateria had to be as close to the core as possible, which meant that, first, Lucrecia had to scan Vincent and determine the exact position of the core, and second, she had to surgically implant Protomateria.

She gave Vincent one last look and went back to her workstation, grinning. Finally, something worked. She sat in her chair and relaxed, looking at the screen. The thought of writing down the new findings lessened her good mood; she didn’t want to give Simon even more information. After a long moment of hesitation, she sighed and started typing.

She was now absolutely sure that Protomateria had never been what Doctor Valentine had thought it to be. It wasn’t an empty container; the Weapon’s information model was, probably, too complex to be stored in any type of Materia. Protomateria was meant to keep Chaos inactive – or, probably, even to control it. The thought made her pause. She reread the words she had just typed.

“If I only had more time, maybe I could find a way to control Chaos..."

"Once a scientist, always a scientist," her inner voice supplied in Simon's mocking tone, and she shook her head.

"No," She said aloud. "I'm not doing this for the thesis, or for the progress of science, or for the future generations. It's for _Vincent_. If Chaos is blocked, it would be enough."

She looked at the nearly-finished entry in her journal, thinking again about Simon finding this information, shuddered and deleted it all.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings in this chapter: physical violence, attempted feticide, suicidal thoughts and general mental instability. Please proceed with caution.

On February 12th Professor Faremis’ expedition departed from the Woodlands Island, heading by sea for Costa del Sol. The travel across the ocean usually took six to eight days, which left less than two weeks until their arrival to Nibelheim. Lucrecia had to hurry.

On 14th of February, when the first rays of sun peeked into the windows of the Mansion, Lucrecia took one final look at the notes and schemes she had made in the previous days, and set them aside. She wasn’t completely ready, but that was probably never going to happen, even if she could afford several more days (or even weeks) of research; she didn’t think it was even possible to be completely ready for something like this.

“I know enough,” she told herself. “I have enough experience in this, and even if I didn’t, there’s no one else who could do this. So now I only have to start this and then finish. Simple.”

Before starting the surgery, she made sure that the lab door was securely locked, and all cameras were turned off. It went against everything she was used to, and, in this case, was immensely dangerous considering what she was working with; but if she was certain about anything at all, it was that this particular experiment wasn’t to be seen or, Goddess forbid, repeated by anyone ever again.

…

The surgery took the whole first half of the day. After it was finished, Lucrecia felt almost proud of herself; it was the most difficult surgery she had ever done, and she did it alone, with no assistance.

She was surprised how easy it was to move Vincent’s body. He seemed to weigh almost nothing, which was only logical, of course, after the months he had spent with no food, kept alive only by Chaos and Mako. The condition of his body after so long period of inactivity was, most likely, another problem to solve, - but it was not the one that could be solved at the moment, so Lucrecia left it for later time.

The rest of the day she spent observing Vincent’s recovery and doing repeated scans of Chaos’ aura. Just as she had predicted, it was now much smaller, condensed. Drawn close by the Protomateria, the Chaos particles formed the familiar multi-layered structure which emitted the similarly layered spherical aura. It was another finding she desperately wanted to write down and spend more time researching, but that had to stay off the record, at least until Vincent was safe from Hojo and other scientists who would want to study the only existing Chaos-infused human, - which was, she suspected, not to happen very soon.

And the whole duration of that day she had to fight the pull towards Sephiroth. Since the moment the Protomateria was settled in Vincent’s chest and Lucrecia wasn’t in close proximity to it anymore, the mental connection to her son seemed to grow stronger than ever before. Often she had to physically hold onto something – her table, a chair, the door handle on couple occasions, - to stop herself from going to Simon immediately and demanding to see her son. She supposed, it was a consequence of being in contact with Protomateria, - whatever influence it had on her Cetra-related abilities, she got used to them being weaker than usual, and now had to adapt to the stronger effects again. She only hoped it would happen sooner than she went completely insane.

By the evening, all the traces of surgery were gone from Vincent’s skin; Mako took care of that, as it did with his other injuries before, and Chaos, even in its inactive state, still kept him from being poisoned. Lucrecia stopped the sedatives and now was simply waiting for him to wake up.

Three hours before midnight she decided that it was time. Arming herself with a screwdriver, she began to disassemble the sensor array, putting away the original parts and throwing away everything that she had modified. When that was done, she gathered all the papers she had written on Chaos-Vincent problem and shredded them. Her personal log came next; she deleted all the entries that even mentioned Vincent’s name, leaving only the general notes on Weapons, Chaos and summons.

Looking at her work of the last several months being destroyed by her own hands, she thought about the long days and nights she had spent in the lab, reading, researching, hoping and despairing. She didn’t regret deleting it all; what she did regret was her inability to undo the changes made to Vincent’s body and give him back his humanity. Even her very best efforts had proved to be not good enough for that.

…

The last minutes of 14th of February had come and gone, and with it, Lucrecia was done wiping all the traces of the Project Chaos from her files.

Finally, after all those months, it was finished.

She knew, of course, that Chaos was still there, hiding just under Vincent’s skin, but for now it was dormant. What was to happen when the Planet’s life was over and it was time for Chaos to awaken, she did not know, the same as she did not know if Vincent remained mortal, if he was to live only the length of a human life, or much longer; if he was to live while everything else withered and died, walking the deserted world alone when all other life was gone. The visions seemed to indicate that, but she hoped it was only a possibility, not a certainty. These questions, however, had to be left for later time, if Vincent even trusted her enough to do the research, if he ever trusted her again enough to let her anywhere near him; for now, Lucrecia was content with the knowledge that he was alive and as Chaos-free as it was possible.

…

Lucrecia had hoped that Simon, with all preparations for Gast’s return, would be too busy to come escort her to the bedroom, but half an hour after midnight he walked into the lab. By force of habit, she moved to shield the screen from him, even if there was nothing to hide anymore. Simon raised his brows, the corners of his lips twitching in a small smile, and walked past her to the Mako tank where Vincent was, thankfully, still unconscious.

“Hm,” Simon hummed, peering through the glass at the sleeping man, “I see you removed all your… custom hardware. Giving up at last?”

Lucrecia gritted her teeth and stayed silent.

“Gast’s team will be here in a little over a week,” he said thoughtfully. “We only have a short time to dispose of… all this garbage.”

Lucrecia turned away from him, planting her palms on the table and desperately trying to calm down. She wanted Simon to stop looking at Vincent and go away. She wanted to scream, to cry, and to kick him. She wanted to take Sephiroth in her arms and _run_ , as far and as fast as she could.

As if sensing her desires, the warm and content feeling from the link changed into something more demanding. The baby was calling to her again, and her own body responded by tensing, muscles twitching with the need to go to him. Instead, she leaned forward, closing her eyes and breathing slowly and deeply, forcing herself to stay in place.

“I just have to wait a few minutes,” she reminded herself, “this will pass soon enough.”

“Lucy,” she heard from somewhere very close over her right ear, and winced, hunching her shoulders even more. “Are you alright?”

“No,” she whispered, holding on to the last vestiges of self-control. “I… _I_ _need_.”

“You-” he started. “What do you need?”

Half-laughing, half-sobbing, she shook her head.  “Just Sephiroth. Nothing else. Please...”

“No, Lucy,” he said. “You know I can’t let you see him.”

“You can,” she croaked, “you can, Simon, please, I need him.”

He sighed and moved away. Feeling less crowded, she began to relax, but what little was left of her self control evaporated with his next words.

“When Gast returns, I’m moving Sephiroth to the headquarters. You’re staying here until-”

“No!” Lucrecia exclaimed, turning around. “You can’t take him from me! He’s my son!”

“The reasons-”

“I don’t _care_ about your reasons!” She shouted, advancing on him. The small, nearly drowned out by panic and rage, part of her brain kept insisting that she had to stop, that aggression won’t make him trust her any more, but she ignored it. “I don’t care! Give him back, give my son back! How dare you steal him from me?”

Simon sighed, looking at her with bored expression. “Lucy,” he said, “stop this. Let’s talk about your, ah, little project instead. How is it proceeding? You ready to give up yet, or need a few more days?”

“I don’t know!” She shouted, advancing at him. “I don’t care! Let me see him! Let me! Let me! _Now!_ ”

“I see,” Hojo said. “I’ll leave you to calm down, then. Don’t forget to get some sleep tonight.” With that, he tried to walk away, but Lucrecia stopped him, grabbing the sleeve of his lab coat.

“No,” she cried, “Simon, please, wait, let me see him, just once! Please!”

“No.”

(“Why beg him?” A voice whispered in her ears. “He is only a _human_ , meat and bones and too much sass for his own good. He is _nothing_.”)

She screamed then, a raw, primal scream ripping out of her throat, and pulled and pushed him. Red clouded her vision.

Far too easily she lifted Hojo in the air and threw him across the room. He landed onto one of the work tables. It broke; papers, pencils and test tubes flew each and every way.

As quick as it came, the hot wave of rage was gone. Instead, cold dread washed over Lucrecia, and she ran to the pile of debris, calling out to Simon. For a few moments he wasn’t moving, but then grunted and sat up from the wreckage, feeling at the back of his head and looking with mild disinterest at his bloodied palm.

Lucrecia froze a few steps away from him, staring at the blood in horror.

“Oh, Simon,” she whispered, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what- I just- Simon, I’m-”

Sighing, he wiped the blood off on his coat, frowned at the red stain and looked up at her. “So you really don’t remember what you did the night Sephiroth was born?”

“I…”

(“…What have I done?”)

_“We created a monster. I will kill it.”_

“No,” she whispered, her eyes widening as the memories began to resurface slowly, “no, no, _no_. This… impossible. I would never…”

Simon snorted.

Lucrecia ran.

…

Lucrecia didn’t know how long she was sitting in the dark. Weak yellow light from the tunnel was just enough for her to see black shapes of long low boxes sitting along the walls.

At one moment, she was sure, Simon had stopped just outside the room, had maybe even said something, but she hadn’t been able to get the meaning of his words.

The wall in her mind had finally been broken, and the memories of the last day of her pregnancy began to spill out, dark and bizarre and confusing.

The dream where the Mansion was turned into a cave.

Purple mist.

The witch.

The message to Ifalna.

Gods, Lucrecia had felt so happy then. So _happy_ …

_“We created a monster. I will kill it.”_

There had been a moment of clarity, though, when instead of euphoria she’d had a brief onslaught of horror at the thought of what she had been preparing to do; she’d stopped then, and went back to the radio room, and sent a “SOS” to Gast’s team. But it had not lasted long. She remembered struggling against herself, as if two halves of her own mind had been at war with each other, - one wanting to kill Sephiroth, another to protect him, - and the first one had won.

…

At some point she looked at the doorway again. Simon was gone. She couldn’t blame him, not anymore, not for anything he had told her. She knew now that he was right: he had been way too kind to her.

…

She remembered the way to the lab; her legs shaking, whole body out of sync with itself. She had very nearly fallen off the stairs when her muscles had begun to spasm unexpectedly. She remembered the simultaneous feelings of happiness and dread, anticipation of finally stopping the nightmare and understanding that she had been about to lose everything.

…

One of the low boxes sat right in the middle of the ray of light coming from the tunnel. Something white was inside, - long thin sticks, and two round objects lying together at the far side. She stared at them without comprehension, relieving the memories again and again.

…

Simon had met her in the middle of the tunnel. “Are you okay?” He had asked, frowning.

She had laughed. “I’ve never been better.”

He had followed her into the lab. She had limped to the fridge (her right leg, for some reason, had been refusing to support her weight properly), looked through the meds and reagents stored there.

Something strong enough to kill the monster. That was what she had needed.

…

Coffins, she understood suddenly. She was sitting in a crypt. The objects in the open coffin in front of her were bones and two skulls.

“Why two?” she wondered absently.

…

“What are you doing?” Simon had asked, sounding confused.

She had laughed again, so happy, so happy _(so terrified)_. “I’m going to get rid of the monster,” she had said. “The experiment was a mistake, but I’ll fix it, right now, I promise, Simon. I’ll fix _everything_.”

(“Sephiroth, Sephiroth,” the voices in her head had cried, “our hope, our salvation,” they had wailed. Wincing, she had rubbed her temple, trying to make them stop.)

“Hm,” Simon had said, stopping, for some reason, in front of the Mako tank. “Are you sure it’s completely unsalvageable?”

“Oh, I am,” she had told him, putting the bottles one by one on the table and looked between them, deciding what to use. “The witch wants us to think that everything is going as we planned, but she’s lying. She’s _lying_ , Simon, do you understand? She – it – it’s not what we thought it was. It’s a _shark_ , Simon, and it only wants to eat. It isn’t going to give us anything, only death.”

He had looked at her, then, his brows raised and a look of confusion and worry on his face. Upon seeing a syringe in her hand and the row of bottles on the table, he had asked, “Lucy? What are you doing?”

“I’m killing the monster,” she had answered, tilting her head to one side and feeling at her abdomen, searching for a place where the fetus’ back had been pushing against the wall of her uterus.

…

The heavy wooden door of the crypt, ripped off its hinges, was lying on the floor. The huge, thick metal bar that had been locking it from the inside lied beside it, bent and twisted. Lucrecia stared through it without really seeing.

…

Simon had leapt towards her then, trying to knock the syringe out of her hands. Despite the weird lack of coordination in her limbs, she had fought him off easily, simply pushing him away with enough force to send him tumbling to the far corner of the lab.

“Just wait, Simon,” she had cheerfully told him, while he had been trying to get up, “I’ll fix everything! I won’t let this _thing_ win.”

“What are you talking about, Lucy,” he had muttered, and she had laughed at his grumpy tone.

“You see, we made a mistake with the witch. Professor Gast was right, we should’ve studied it longer, learned more about it. We were too impatient. _You_ were too impatient.” She pointed a finger at him, before returning to the task. “But I’m fixing it all now. You’ll see, Simon, everything will be fine. Ah, there it is!”

She had turned her back on Simon and headed to the surgical table, paying no attention to whatever else he had tried to tell her, but before she could have even made a few steps, another wave of spasms came over her. Nearly dropping the syringe, she had leaned on the nearest work table, waiting it out, and forgot about Simon entirely.

Not for long; suddenly he had been right behind her, grabbing her shoulder, trying to turn her around, shouting something. She had tried to understand what he had been saying, but the sounds, again, had become strangely distorted. The voices had returned, whispering and crying all around her, - or had it all been only inside her own head? – and Simon’s words had been drowning out among them.

She had understood the general idea, though, from the look on his face, -he had been trying to convince her to stop. Somehow he had lost his glasses, and his eyes had been wide and bright with – fear? No, impossible, she had told herself, nobody ever had seen Simon scared of anything, - his hair had been messed wildly, and he had looked positively insane. She frowned, wondering what could have scared him so, and pushed him away again, not so forcefully this time, mindful of possible injuries.

Her legs still had been unwilling to cooperate; after a few attempts at getting them to move she had given up and decided that she hadn’t really needed the bright light that much.

She had pulled up her shirt, felt at the naked skin again and quickly plunged the needle into the right side of her abdomen. Sharp pain had shot up her body, making her groan and nearly drop the still full syringe. Taking a few calming breaths, she had fought to keep control of her limbs. As she had begun to push the plunger, something had impacted painfully with the back of her head – once, twice, - and everything had gone black.

…

Lucrecia stared at her hands. Her fingernails were uneven where she had been biting on them. When was the last time she had cared about her nails… or her looks in general? About practically anything that wasn’t Sephiroth or Chaos?..

She had lost so much of herself since the Project had begun. What had she turned into? How had it happened? How had she _allowed_ it to happen?

Did what was left of her even deserve to live?

_“We created a monster. I will kill it.”_

But as she knew now, that was only half true. They had definitely created a monster, but it wasn’t Sephiroth.

It wasn’t Sephiroth _at all._

The only real monster, all this time, had been hiding inside Lucrecia’s own head.

Had it been there always, she wondered, - even before the Jenova Project, had it been there, hiding somewhere in the deepest, darkest corner of her mind, underneath everything she had believed herself to be?

The metal bar, thicker than her arm but bent by her bare hands, attracted her gaze again. Somewhere above her, in the Mansion, - she could sense the exact spot, - Sephiroth was sleeping in his crib, all three-something kilograms of soft flesh and thin bones behind a much less sturdy door than the one she had broken down so easily with her bare hands. Simon was there, too, she knew, looking over the child, - but could he _really_ protect the baby? Would he shoot to kill her if needed? Or would he hesitate again, try to talk her down instead? Would the cost of hesitation be his own life, - along with Sephoroth’s?

She didn’t know. She didn’t really _know_ Simon Hojo, even after all the time they had studied, and worked, and lived together. How could she, when she didn’t even know what things were lurking inside her own mind?

Lucrecia looked at her hands again.

“I nearly killed my son with these. I hurt Simon in the process.”

The thought seemed completely ridiculous; she would never have harmed Sephiroth… Never. Not for anything. It was simply impossible even to think about.

Only she _had_ done it, all of it. And now that she had remembered how _exactly_ it had happened, there wasn’t any way to pretend it hadn’t.

Her eyes were dry when she pushed herself up, off the dusty stone floor. Some small shadows hurried to get out of her way; she hardly noticed them.

…

The lab was empty. The remains of the broken table were still there, and Lucrecia looked away from it quickly, glanced at the clock instead, surprised that it was only a little after two; it felt like she had spent this whole night in the crypt. But it was to the better. Simon wasn’t going to return until the morning, and Vincent wasn’t going to wake up for at least a few more hours.

She crossed the room, opened the cabinet and pulled out a box of scalpels. Taking one, she turned around and went back to the crypt.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered as she walked, unsure who she was apologizing to. “I’m so, so sorry.”

Sephiroth’s presence was as warm and bright as ever, but the only thing it made her feel now was guilt.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings in this chapter: Temporary character death, mentions of suicide, suicidal thoughts.

For a long time Lucrecia floats in space, unthinking, unfeeling.

The first thing she becomes aware of is darkness. Darkness, and then cold.

There’s only one tiny flickering orange light somewhere far, far above her, like a candlelight, - almost too far to even see it.

Lucrecia’s mind is waking up slowly, sluggish and lazy, thoughts moving in slow circles.

 _Sephiroth_ , she thinks. _Sephiroth is safe now. I’m in the dark, and Sephiroth is safe._

She doesn’t really remember who or what Sephiroth is, but the thought brings comfort.

Slowly she becomes more aware of her surroundings. The darkness around her is nearly complete, but through it she sees a great dark shape, as large as a mountain; its outline glows with faint green light, a strangely familiar shape towers before her.

A flower, she understands suddenly. It’s an enormous flower, with multiple petals curved upwards and a stem – or is it a tail? – curved in a spiral under it. On one side the flower seems to be damaged, – the petals are crumpled, disfigured; tiny white particles are floating above that place. The thought of the flower losing its perfect beauty brings Lucrecia a strangely deep feeling of sadness.

She tries to move closer, but nothing happens. Trying to look at herself, she finds no body to see. Lucrecia finds it interesting, as well as the fact that she isn’t in the slightest scared by her body’s absence. Attempting to move again, she doesn’t expect to succeed, – and so doesn’t stop in time when the flower moves closer. A moment later, when she finally stops, it’s far closer than before; with curiosity she notices that the petals aren’t smooth. They seem to be formed by smaller shapes, curling into each other, intertwined so it’s hard to see where one ends and another begins-

She isn’t even that surprised when, tracing one of the shapes with her gaze, she sees a scaly wing and a toothy mouth of a dragon. It seems to be no larger than a kitten, though, and she wonders where such small dragons live… until she traces another, smaller, shape and finds out that it is a humanoid.

The whole picture suddenly comes into focus. The flower is truly gigantic, and its petals are made out of translucent bodies of all kinds of creatures. Some of them are familiar to Lucrecia, others she is sure never saw before.

Something at the edge of her field of vision catches her attention; she moves her focus there. One of the tiny specks of light that were floating above the damaged petals is slowly descending towards her. She tries to move to meet it; this time, she is ready to stop soon enough.

The speck of light turns out to be a snowflake-like crystal, transparent but glowing with white light. She tries to reach out for it. As she moves, the snowflake grows impossibly larger, its light consuming everything around, completely blinding her for a moment.

When the light fades out, Lucrecia finds herself in a white corridor, narrow, with no doors or windows, the floor slanted to the left and back. Bright, pale green light is coming from water-filled bowls standing on a narrow ledge that stretches along the right wall. The light glimmers to the tune of a quiet slow melody; someone seems to be singing somewhere up above her, although Lucrecia cannot discern the words. The song, however, stops abruptly, – the lights flicker uncertainly, going almost completely dark, and the ground shakes under Lucrecia’s feet, – then starts again, as if the singer forgot the lyrics and started anew.

Looking around, Lucrecia can only see a small part of the passage. Lucrecia takes a few hesitant steps forward and sees that the corridor continues to turn to the left – as if it was spiraling around something, leading up.

The song stops again; the lights flicker out, the ground trembles. Lucrecia freezes in sudden darkness, holding her breath, but the song starts, and the lights brighten. She steps closer to the ledge to look at the bowls. They are filled not with water, as she thought at first, but with a strange substance, – not quite liquid, not quite mist, glimmering whitish-green and swirling around. Its movement creates swiftly changing shapes of light and shadow on the walls and the ceiling.

Lucrecia crouches before the ledge and looks closer at the swirling liquid. With curiosity, she extends her arms and touches the liquid with her index finger-

She finds herself on the familiar stone path carved into mountain side; someone is walking beside her, talking, but she is unable to turn her head and look.

“…all of them, lost,” the person, – seemingly female, – says. “The whole village, in just a few days.”

“So, no Oracles left? Not even one?” asks someone’s voice. It takes Lucrecia a few moments to understand that the voice came out of her own mouth.

“Only a few, and those all are small children. Their parents were at the summit.”

“So now we have no way of predicting how this situation will proceed.”

Finally, Lucrecia’s head turns and she sees her companion, – whose face, for a moment, looks completely featureless, and then with a ripple of colors shifts into Ifalna’s image.

“Well, I cannot say we ever had it.” Ifalna sighs. “As you know, Oracles were unable to predict anything concerning this… Calamity.”

“And now they are all dead.”

 _Who those Oracles were,_ Lucrecia wonders, _and why were they so important?_

The world blinks out of sight and back in-

She is sitting on a low stone bench in the middle of a round clearing surrounded by tall trees, looking at her own scrawny knees. Her legs seem to be too thin and too short, as if they belong to a child.

“This is not _my_ memory,” Lucrecia thinks. “I have to remember this, even after I wake up.”

Her head turns, and she finds that she is not alone. Other children are sitting on the benches around her. Their faces are hidden by blurred shadows; when she looks one of them straight in the face, it comes into focus and she sees that it’s her school friend Selena.

“…mean that I can’t marry an Oracle?” someone asks. The voice seems vaguely familiar, but Lucrecia’s gaze stays turned forward and she doesn’t see who it is.

A woman enters her field of vision. Lucrecia looks at her; the shadow ripples over the invisible face, and suddenly it comes into view, familiar and unfamiliar at once. It’s Lucrecia’s grandmother, Kamila, – only it’s not her, cannot be.

“You can marry whoever you want,” she says. “There are no rules prohibiting it, and if anyone as much as tries to push you into a relationship you don’t want, you have to tell Elders immediately. But if you marry an Oracle, your children would only inherit your abilities, and not their father’s. And why is that?”

Another invisible child answers, “Because children, before they are born, attune themselves to the part of the Song their mothers are able to perceive. After birth, it’s already too late. This means, only Oracle mothers can give birth to Oracles, because only Oracles can hear the Song of Time.”

“Correct,” not-Kamila says. “What about Priests and Summoners?”

“Both have similar abilities,” not-Selena answers. “It’s possible for a Summoner to learn to control the flow, as well as for a Priest to learn summoning… But it would take years, and children would be born with weak attunement to both Songs and need additional training. So it’s… kind of unwise to waste your own time and your children’s like that.”

“But some disagree,” another child supplies, “and think that they can become a Priest coming from a family of Summoners-“

“Stop,” not-Kamila says. “This is enough.”

Lucrecia looks down at her knees again. Walking past her, not-Kamila pats her shoulder.

“What about humans?” She asks.

“Humans are lazy and irresponsible,” a boy’s voice answers. “Their minds are absolutely chaotic; they can’t attune to any Song, neither can their children. I don’t understand why they are even considered equal to us, when they’ve chosen to be just animals-“

“Enough,” not-Kamila stops him. “Their ancestors chose to not attune their minds to any of the Songs because they believed that such attunement twisted our original purpose and gave us an unfair advantage over other races. That was their choice, true, and they live with the consequences of it-“

“Yeah,” the boy quips, “until we come and solve their problems!”

“And this,” not-Kamila says, “is _our_ choice: to care for Gaia and all Her children equally. Now-”

The sounds fade. For a moment Lucrecia can still see the scene around her, then it fades, and she finds herself back in the darkness. The snowflake somehow moved away, spinning, as if caught by wind; she tries to chase it, but misses and, somehow, ends up very close to the flower.

This close, Lucrecia can see every single body very clearly; they seem to be fused together, with no visible space between them. Through their translucent shapes, she sees a pulsing light coming from inside the flower. It looks like a gigantic purple Materia hidden in the very heart of the flower, and shines so warm, so bright, that before Lucrecia could stop herself, she reaches out to it-

She is in the middle of a fight. The world is burning around her; flames lick the heavy, dark clouds, and all she hears, for a moment, are explosions and screams. Then she feels herself fly higher, above the clouds, and she sees-

Two giants fighting, earth shattering under their feet; one of them is black and red, with eyes burning purple, while the other is gold and blue. The gold giant staggers, and the black one pierces him with a huge sword-

“And so the old mighty god Ea fell, as young hero-god Anu bested him in battle and took his place in the kingdom of Ki,” a voice sounds.

The scene changes – a black bat-like creature dives from the sky, attacking a young woman; the voice sounds again, saying, “Old Goddess Terra fell in battle against the young hero-god Caelum.”

Again the scene changes, and again, and again; in every one of them, a “new god” defeats an old one; and in every one of them, beside a “new god” Lucrecia sees the familiar slender form of the purple-eyed witch.

The world fades out and back in, and Lucrecia sees a young woman in a long pink dress. She seems to be praying; her eyes are closed, and her head is bowed. Suddenly a shadow descends from the darkness above, with sword raised to struck, and Lucrecia sees its face, and at the same time recognizes the woman-

“Sephiroth!” she shouts. “Ifalna! No!”

She lunges forward-

“Sister! No!”

The world around her is white. Snow is swirling all around, save for a small area around her, protected by a barrier spell. Outside the barrier, she sees a woman-

It’s Ifalna. Only it’s not her, Lucrecia reminds herself, because these are not her own memories.

As if to confirm it, Ifalna gives a toothy grin and comes closer, putting her hand on the barrier and stroking it slowly.

“Will you let me in, sister?” She says sweetly. “It’s so very cold outside.”

“You aren’t my sister,” Lucrecia whispers, feeling a hot tear slipping down her cheek. “Not anymore.”

“Are you sure?” not-Ifalna asks, raising her brows. “I wear her face, I have her memories… How am I not her? What is the difference?”

 Lucrecia doesn’t answer. She feels herself concentrate on something, some kind of a feeling she can’t quite decipher, which makes her head spin a little, and the memory around her to lose focus for a moment.

The wind seems to howl louder, and the snowstorm intensifies.

“You understand that this, all this, is pointless?” not-Ifalna asks. “This won’t kill me. Your kind, on the other hand… They are dying right now, you know?”

Tears slide down Lucrecia’s cheeks, but she keeps quiet.

“They are burning themselves out to keep me here, frozen,” the Ifalna-shaped _thing_ continues, slowly walking the circle around the barrier. “But you have to understand that this winter isn’t going to last forever. Someday the cold will weaken, the snow will melt… and who will stop me then, if none of you will be around? Isn’t it better to stop this madness, sister? I’ll even let you go back to your precious Library and live the rest of your days in peace.”

“Humans will stop you,” Lucrecia says. “They’ll have time, and all our knowledge, on their side. They’ll find a way.”

“Oh, humans!” the _thing_ exclaims in a mocking tone. “How could I forget about them! How did that boy from your class call them? – ah, yes, – lazy, irresponsible, with minds incapable of forming one clear thought! _Of course_ they’ll find a way to stop me!”

“He was wrong,” Lucrecia says.

“Was he? Why are you so sure? He was right about _me_!” The _thing_ grins.

“Because Gaia places her trust with them, and I should too.”

The thing hums, continuing its slow circular path. Its right hand never leaves the barrier; it seems to glow dimmer where the hand touches it.

“I don’t think humans will be very trusting to your kind,” the _thing_ says at last. “How do you think they see what’s happening now?”

Lucrecia glances at not-Ifalna briefly. Its sight brings almost physical pain; familiar, loved face twisted in an alien expression, eyes glowing faint purple… she looks away again.

“Well, I will tell you,” not-Ifalna says. “They won’t believe a word coming out of your people’s mouths. And do you know why? Because your dumb Elders kept me a secret for too long, and I haven’t wasted that time. I had my puppets sent to humans’ villages; they never last long, but long enough to plant seeds of mistrust. And what do humans think is happening now? All they see is you, an evil witch of the North, killing your own kind and humans alike with a blizzard the kind of which the world had never seen before. What they will believe, is that the Cetra are the worst kind of monsters. Even in a thousand years they will not forget, and they will never trust your people again.”

“You are lying,” Lucrecia chokes out.

“You want to believe I am, but you know I am not,” the _thing_ smirks, finishing another circle. The bubble of the barrier flickers briefly, but still holds. The snowstorm grows even stronger.

“No,” Lucrecia says. “You’re just trying to stop me from finishing my task.”

“I don’t think you really believe that,” the thing smiles. “Do you know how they will remember you, my dear sister, Zenova?”

“I don’t care,” whispers Lucrecia, – or Zenova – or… Jenova?

“Oh, I think you do, sister-“

“I- DON’T- CARE!” Jenova shouts. The snowstorm howls like a pack of hungry bandersnatches. A sudden onset of wind knocks not-Ifalna down; she disappears under the swirling snow.

“And you are _not my sister_ ,” adds Jenova with venom.

The thing climbs up to its feet, swaying with the gusts of wind. It snarls wordlessly at Jenova, stalks closer to the barrier which is barely holding now. With one sharp strike of a claw-like hand, the thing breaks it. Jenova closes her eyes and concentrates one last time. She has to finish the process. Only a few more moments…

Only a few moments…

Only a few-

Cold claws are closing around her throat. She feels cold sliding under her skin, up her veins-

Just a little more-

“The flow is steady,” she thinks with contentment, feeling the icy tendrils reach her eyes. “I’ve done it.”

The cold engulfs her completely. The world fades away, and she fades away along with it.

…

Lucrecia came awake with a gasp, momentarily blinded by a harsh white light. Squinting against it, she looked around, confused. What had happened? Had she fallen unconscious again? The last thing she remembered…

Oh.

The crypt.

She remembered her blood slowly pooling around her. She remembered pain and cold, remembered darkness rising and enveloping her, pulling her under.

Why wasn’t she dead yet?

Simon’s face appeared in her field of vision. He looked exhausted. She tried to say something, but started coughing instead; he helped her sit up and pressed a cup of water to her lips. Water smelled faintly of Mako; strangely, the smell made her want more. She drank all of it gratefully, stopping only to take a breath.

While Simon turned around to put the cup on the table, she quickly looked herself over. Her dress was crusted with dried blood; her forearms were wrapped in white gauze stained with blood, but she wasn’t feeling any pain.

“Let me,” Simon said, taking one of her arms. He undid the bandage and put it away. Underneath, her skin was unbroken, with only a long thick red scar running along her forearm, small bits of some kind of thread stuck to its sides. While they both watched, the scar grew significantly paler and smoother until it was hardly even visible.

“Hm, interesting,” commented Simon. “Your regeneration speed isn’t much worse than Sephiroth’s. I expected this to take longer.”

“You… expected this?” She asked, confused. “Did you know I was going to…”

“Suicide?” He asked. “No. I only meant regeneration. I saw it happen to Sephiroth before.”

Lucrecia looked at the healed arm. The scar grew even paler. No doubt, soon enough it would be completely gone, leaving no visible trace. Flexing her fingers and gingerly rotating the wrist, she observed the movement of muscles beneath the skin. There was no pain, no difficulty of movements. The cut really seemed to have healed. Lucrecia raised her head, meeting Simon’s watchful eyes, searched her brain for something to say. Thank him? Tell him he shouldn’t have troubled himself patching her up if she was going to heal anyway?

She didn’t say anything, shifting her gaze away from him to the discarded gauze.

Simon wordlessly unwrapped her other arm, revealing the same smooth, whole skin with a faint scar still visible. Lucrecia observed, wondering if she should have felt anything about this. Disappointment, probably. Anger, maybe. Guilt, most definitely.

She felt nothing.

“I’m tired,” she said when he was done. “I’ll go to my room.”

She felt Simon’s gaze on her back all the way to the door, but he didn’t say a word.

…

In her room, Lucrecia picked up some random clothes from the dresser without even noticing what exactly it was, and went to the bathroom. Her dress was completely ruined; she took it off, wincing when dried blood pulled at the small hairs on her skin, and dropped it on the floor. Her underwear followed. Avoiding her reflection in the mirror, she stepped in the shower and turned the water on, letting it beat over her head and back and looking at the pink rivulets flowing down her legs and disappearing down the drain.

She still felt nothing.

Reaching for the washcloth, she soaped it up and began to wash herself methodically, cleaning away all the traces of blood. She was almost done when her hands began to shake slightly. She looked at them in numb confusion, wondering what was happening. Her gaze went to the forearms again, to the smooth skin where the cuts had been.

She was still alive.

She was alive because she had failed to kill herself.

She had failed, because Jenova’s cells hadn’t let her die.

Lucrecia felt her whole body quaking; it still felt like something happening to someone else, distant and unreal. Her legs were beginning to shake too much to stay upright, so she slowly lowered herself down onto the wet tiles. Water kept falling all around her. The need to see Sephiroth was burning deep in her chest, making her breath hitch with effort to stay in place. She wondered idly how long it would be until she snapped (again) and tried to get her son despite Hojo’s protests. She wondered if he was prepared to stop her.

She had tried to stop herself, but failed.

Sephiroth was still in danger.

Suddenly it was hard to breathe; she gulped the air, and then again. The shaking became even harder. Through the noise of falling water she could hear sobbing.

“Someone is crying,” she thought.

“Oh. It’s me.”

…

By the time Lucrecia emerged from the shower, she felt a little better. The awful numbness was gone, as was the terrible despair and helplessness.

Yes, she had failed, but that had happened before she learned about regeneration. Now she knew, and she could think of a few ways to work around it.

Yes, she was probably hard to kill, but that didn’t mean she was immortal. It just had to be something quick.

This was just another scientific problem, Lucrecia thought. Just another scientific problem to solve. Not even the first time she had had to figure out how to kill-

How to kill some kind of a monster or another.

She dried herself off and began to put on the random clothes she picked earlier, wincing at the ridiculous ensemble, - red shirt, black slacks, yellow tie and white lab coat. She put it all on anyway; it didn’t really matter what she was wearing.

Cautiously she exited the bathroom, abandoning a heap of her bloodied clothes on the floor. The house was quiet and dark. Lucrecia stopped in front of a window for a moment, looking at the damp ground and naked trees. The sky was low and grey with heavy rainclouds, only just beginning to brighten. She stayed in place for a few minutes, thinking about nothing and everything at the same time, lost in memories of happy sunny days, and Vincent’s eyes, and Ifalna’s laughter… Until, eventually, - far, far too soon, - her thoughts were inevitably drawn to the small boy in Simon’s room and the white expanse of northern snow fields. She sighed heavily, forcing herself to turn away and start walking the direction opposite of where she longed to go.

Just one last thing to do and she was ready to leave the Mansion forever.

…

In the lab, she took the box of Doctor Valentine’s rare Materia. There was one labeled “Image Materia,” the one that could be used to record a holographic message. She reached for it, but instead, giving in to an impulse, took the one that was labeled “Memory Materia.” These were extremely rare; they allowed recording memories and playing them back, although no one knew how to initiate the process of recording. This particular piece seemed a little different from others of the same type: slightly bigger, more green than blue in color, - that was why Grimoire wanted to study in more, believing that it was capable of storing the whole entirety of person’s memories. He’d never had a chance to check it, though.

Holding the green sphere in both hands, Lucrecia looked into it and thought how lucky she had been to see Doctor Valentine again, one last time, how, even after death, he still had been helping her.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “If I only knew what I was doing… I never wanted anything to happen to you… to Vincent… but…

“I only hope that he can live and be happy, even after this… after what we, me and Simon, did to him.”

Lucrecia sighed, closing her eyes and lowering her forehead until it touched the smooth surface of the sphere. She thought of the memories she would have wanted Doctor Valentine to have left behind, of the ones she would have wanted to leave for her friends, if she could. Her mind wandered through the memories, from her childhood in the newly-discovered Bone Village where she had spent a few pre-school years, to the last time she had seen Ifalna, - how harsh Lucrecia had been then, how offended by her friend’s mistrust… She relieved the past horrific months and her desperate attempts to save Vincent, the discoveries she had made that were never to see the light of day, the glorious moment when she had created the perfect essence of Chaos, - only for her hopes to be crushed when the Weapon easily overpowered the human’s will.

Lost in memories, she didn’t notice at first that the sphere was vibrating a little against her forehead. She lowered the Materia to look at it and was surprised at how heavy it felt now; inside, in its bright sea-green depths, hundreds of tiny blurry images were moving: Professor Faremis gesturing at something, Hojo and Hollander arguing, Lucrecia holding the vial of Chaos essence…

Lucrecia nearly dropped the sphere. “What?” she whispered. “How did this happen? Did I activate it? Oh no! How do I delete all this now?”

She turned the sphere this way and that, but, of course, there was nothing but smooth crystal surface. “Okay,” she muttered. “If I activated it with a thought, then maybe I can empty it with a thought, too?”

Pressing her forehead again to the sphere, she focused as hard as she could and thought as loud and clear as she could, “I need this gone. Nobody should see these memories. Make them go away.” The sphere vibrated for a couple more seconds and stopped. Lucrecia opened one eye, peering at it cautiously. The Materia wasn’t semi-transparent anymore; it was opaque, its green surface reflecting Lucrecia’s distorted face. She doubted the memories were completely gone, - the sphere was just as heavy as it was before, - but, at least, now there was no way to see them.

She put the Memory Materia back into the box and reached for the Image Materia, when she felt a familiar pull through the mental connection, as strong as ever. Sephiroth was waking up, and that meant Simon would soon be up too.

Lucrecia closed her eyes and focused on breathing, fighting against the overwhelming need to be close to the baby. When the worst of it passed, she quickly took the box of Materia and pushed it under her table. There was no time left to write a message.

The night was almost over. She had to hurry before someone stopped her.

…

The Mansion didn’t have a large arsenal of firearms available for the scientific staff; there hadn’t ever been any real need for that, given how peaceful the small town was. What little they did have (except for Simon’s handgun and Turk’s weapons which were kept no one knew where), was locked in a strongbox in the library adjacent to the lab.

Lucrecia opened the door gingerly; she hadn’t been in there since retrieving Doctor Valentine’s research notes along with several books on Materia, - back in October, when, slowly losing all enthusiasm she’d ever had for Jenova Project, she had decided to busy herself with something more interesting.

The library was dark and quiet. She pulled the switch, and overhead lights flared to life, flooding the room with bright yellow. The strongbox was hidden behind a removable part of one of the bookshelves, marked by a complete set of works by N. Townbee (twelve thick black books with silver letters on spines: “History of Civilizations”). Lucrecia pulled out a few books, found a switch and pressed it, releasing the lock, then moved the section aside, revealing a small recess with the strongbox.

On the top of the box, a single book was lying, old-looking, with frayed corners and half-worn gilding on the letters. Lucrecia squinted, trying to make out the words. The book title read, “The tales of North.” It was a familiar title; as a child, it was one of her favorite books of tales. But this one seemed an older edition, maybe even the very first, not an adaptation for small children. On impulse, she crouched down in front of the strongbox and picked the book up, opened it and read, “Myths, legends and folk tales of nations of the Northern Continent, collected by E. Marius.”

On the first, blank, page there was an inscription.

“Gast,

Congratulations on your Cetra, and thanks for the vote of confidence. You know how much it means to me. I believe that this time I am right and the Crystal Cave is the place… but you won the race, friend. This book is yours now.

P.S. I will forever regret not beating you to it, Gast; watching you eat that hat would have been such a delight.

Grim. V.”

The inscription ended with a date. Lucrecia recognized it as a day only shortly before Doctor Valentine’s expedition had left Midgar, heading to the Crystal Cave.

She closed the book carefully and put it on the floor beside her, fighting a nostalgic smile. She wondered what the bet between Gast and Grimoire could have been. Whose theory was to be confirmed first, probably?

She sighed and shook her head, reaching out for the door of the strongbox. It was unexpectedly difficult; her earlier resolve and determination had evaporated, and now her hand was trembling slightly.

“I want to see Iffie again,” she whispered, “and Professor Gast. I want to hold Sephiroth. I want to see Vincent wake up.”

“You don’t have to give it all up,” her inner voice supplied. “Sephiroth is your son. Hojo is wrong for keeping him away from you.”

She put her head in her hands, trying to block the voice that now sounded louder and louder in both her ears.

“You are the one Sephiroth needs,” the voice sang, “to hold him, to love him, to leave this hole and take him far, far away. Mother, mother, help him, take him, bring him home.”

“No,” she whispered, “no, no, no. Not again. I need to… need to do this, quickly.”

Her fingers were shaking still, and it took her several attempts to input the code. She took her handgun and left the library, walking as fast as she could.

“The tales of North” was left lying on the floor in front of the opened strongbox, the remaining gold paint on the book’s cover glistening in the bright yellow light of the overhead lamps.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings in this chapter: Suicide, Temporary character death.

The Mansion was quiet save for the persistent whistling of wind, though from under Simon’s room door a weak light was coming. Lucrecia walked through the empty halls barefoot, carrying her shoes in her hand and holding her breath at every sound she made; every small creak of a floorboard seemed too loud in the silence. Several times she had to stop, squeezing her temples with her free hand and closing her eyes, trying to stop the voices, to hold back from turning around and going to Sephiroth.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, she reached the lobby. Crossing it, she paused before the door and looked back over her shoulder.

“Maybe I should return, just for a moment,” she thought, “write a note to Vincent, at least. He’s going to be so confused when he wakes up…”

The voices inside her head enthusiastically agreed with the idea. Lucrecia hovered uncertainly, glancing between the door and the stairs, for a few minutes, until a noise interrupted her. Somewhere in the Mansion, someone’s room door has opened and closed.

That decided it; a moment later, Lucrecia was outside, closing the door behind her as quickly and quietly as possible.

For the first time since _forever_ she was out of the Shinra Mansion.

The world met her with strong wind and an annoying drizzle. She put on her shoes and stepped off the porch, right into a half-frozen puddle of water which immediately spilled inside. It should have been freezing, Lucrecia knew, but all she felt was wetness of water and gusts of wind.

She left the main road and turned to a small stone path that led deeper into the garden. Once upon a time, in the middle of an autumn, she had walked it with Ifalna and Nils at her sides, discussing their progress on Jenova’s cells… She still remembered the exact moment Simon had interrupted the discussion, running up to them to tell about the first successful attempt at implanting Jenova Type-2 cells into human tissue. Now that faraway memory seemed even less real than visions of a long-dead Cetra.

The Cetra that had been infected with some kind of a parasitic organism (Lucrecia shuddered, remembering the sensation of cold entering her veins)… which was _exactly_ what Jenova Type-2 cells where.

Lucrecia stopped in her tracks, struck by that sudden realization. How had she missed it? The visions had been telling her that for a while now; how had she not understood? The Cetra had been infected. Lucrecia remembered her visions of the old University Library – or, she guessed, the Library of the Cetra, – and not-Gast talking about people who had turned violent after meeting their dead loved ones. The Plague that had spread despite all efforts to stop it, infecting and killing whole villages in span of a few days. Jenova, the Cetra who had died in the middle of the Northern Crater in the last desperate attempt at containing the infection. Jenova had been infected, too; Lucrecia had seen and felt the very moment it had happened. And, she was fairly certain, _that_ Jenova was _the_ Cetra whose remains had been excavated by Gast’s expedition and used for the Project.

That was it. The true Cetra cells were those ordinary cells, carrying ordinary human genes, which she herself had labeled Type-1. Jenova Type-2 cells, completely different ones, had never belonged to Cetra race at all.

A parasite that had infected Cetra people, – and now, her, – making them violent. That what they were.

She turned in place and started walking back towards the Mansion. Her own death could wait a little. She had to warn Simon first, and, for a good measure, leave personal messages for Professor Faremis and Ifalna.

Simon met her at the intersection between the small path and the main road. He looked like he just had climbed out of bed where he had been sleeping in his clothes; his shirt, quickly-soaking under the drizzle, was crumpled, as well as his trousers, and his hair was mussed. She ran up to him, slipping on the wet tiles covered with last year’s leaves. He frowned at the gun in her hand, but said nothing, looking at her expectantly.

“We have to stop the experiment immediately!” she exclaimed as soon as she was close enough.

Simon raised his brows. “Why?”

“Because – I just realized– Simon, I had visions again–“

“Visions?” he interrupted. “The same kind you had during pregnancy?”

“No, not… not exactly. Remember that time I passed out and Sephiroth was distressed? That was the first time. Then I had more, and the last one… happened when I was dead.”

“You weren’t _dead_ ,” Simon said.

Lucrecia shook her head impatiently. “Dead, dying, it doesn’t matter. But I saw parts of Jenova’s – that Cetra we were experimenting with – I saw parts of her memories.  Just parts, and it was so confusing at first, but now, now I understand…”

Simon continued to stare silently at her. His eyebrows were climbing higher and higher.

“I think- no, no, I’m sure, absolutely sure, that Jenova Type-2 cells are in fact a parasitic organism and not Cetra cells,” she said hurriedly. “And we should stop the experiment immediately and seek a way to remove the parasite from Sephiroth-“

“Why?” Simon asked again.

“What do you mean – _why_?”  Lucrecia looked at him with wide eyes. She had expected him to be at least surprised by her words, but he just seemed… completely unimpressed.

“What difference does it make,” he said, “if it’s Cetra’s cells or not if it does what we intended it to do?”

“How _doesn’t_ it make a difference?” Lucrecia practically shouted, clenching her fists. “It’s a _parasite_! You see what it’s done to me!”

“Yes, I see it,” Simon admitted calmly. “It has made you exceptionally strong and resilient, it’s given you an ability to regenerate and survive even a very severe blood loss, you’ve got a mental link with your child, – is all this not good enough? I’m sure Gast would agree with me on that,“ he added.

“It also nearly made me kill Sephiroth… and you, too,” Lucrecia said quietly, her hopes fading away together with her will to fight. Simon was right, she supposed. Gast wouldn’t see anything bad in using the parasite as long as it did what they wanted, would he? She had no one on her side.

“Well, all new treatments come with unexpected complications,” Simon said. “We’ll deal with it in time. Come back into the Mansion, Lucy,” he shivered, glancing at the clouds, and put his hands into his pockets. “It’s far too cold here.”

“I can’t,” Lucrecia said quietly. “Don’t you see? It’s too dangerous, _I’m too dangerous_ -“

“Stop being ridiculous,” Simon said, extending his hand towards her. “Come with me.”

She moved backwards a step, another. “I can’t,” she whispered. “You don’t understand, Simon, _I can’t control it_ -“

“We’ll figure it out,” he soothed. Lucrecia shook her head.

“No,” she said, “No, I can’t, Simon. I’m- Please, look after Sephiroth,” she pleaded. “Don’t let him become _this_ , too.”

She looked at the Mansion windows, glowing with soft yellow light, and felt an exceptionally strong pull towards her baby, so strong that she gasped under the weight of it and made an involuntary step forward. Simon squinted at her, but didn’t say or do anything. Lucrecia managed to stop herself after just one more step, and squeezed her temples between her hands, trying to come back to herself.

“I have to go,” she said hurriedly, feeling the pull strengthening again. “I’m sorry.”

She turned away and started walking, then ran. Simon shouted something after her, but she wasn’t listening. The voices inside her head were shouting too, louder and louder the farther she got from the Mansion. After a few moments she had to return to walking. It was hard to move her legs; she felt like she was moving against a strong wind. The world blurred before her eyes.

“You can’t go away,” the voices told her. “You can’t abandon Sephiroth.”

“Mother, Mother,” the voices sang, “come back, come back to us.”

The pressure against her chest became so strong that she had to stop. From behind she could hear footsteps, approaching quickly.

In the last desperate attempt to get away, she lifted the gun, put in under her chin and pulled the trigger.

 

* * *

 

The darkness surrounds her. The slow pulse of purple light is the first thing she sees when she is able to see again.

She floats in space above an enormous black flower. Its petals are shining translucent crystals, and in its core a purple sphere is pulsing; Lucrecia could swear that there’s a quiet slow song coming from it, raising and fading with the pulse of light. One side of the flower seems to be damaged. A small cloud of shining white particles is floating above the crumpled petals.

Lucrecia has a feeling she has seen this already somewhere.

She shifts her focus and looks up. Far, far away she can see a flickering orange light. It looks warm and welcoming like candlelight. She wants to go there, and so she begins to move.

Up and up she goes, but the light doesn’t grow any closer, and when she shifts her focus again to look down, the flower isn’t any farther away. Nothing seems to have changed, except for one of the particles slowly moving her way.

She reaches towards it, and this time the attempt at movement works; the particle grows quickly, turning into a snowflake-shaped crystal that grows bigger and bigger until she can’t see anything else. Its white light envelops her, and when it fades-

Lucrecia finds herself in the familiar white spiral passage. She remembers it now, as well as the black flower.

“I guess I _am_ dead now,” she thinks. “Finally.”

She starts walking along the passage, heading upwards where the song is sounding; just the same few tunes, the same few undistinguishable words, over and over, as if the singer forgot the rest of the lyrics and just starts over every time. And every time the song comes to a stop the lights flicker, and the ground shakes under Lucrecia’s feet.

She eyes the mist-filled bowls sitting on the low ledge that stretches along the outer wall, but doesn’t try to touch any of them again. Those are memories, she knows now, but she is more curious about the person they belong to, who, Lucrecia _knows_ , is waiting for her somewhere ahead.

After another turn, the passage ends in a small, sparsely furnished round room. Its walls are the same white material as the passage, and its floor is hidden by straw mats. Through the only window Lucrecia sees nothing but swirling fog. She looks around. A narrow quilt-covered bed is tucked close to a wall. Opposite it, under the window, stands a small wooden table with a statue of a woman on a chair beside it. The statue looks old; small parts of it has crumbled off, littering the floor around.

The song pauses; the room trembles. The song starts anew, and, to her surprise, Lucrecia notices that it is the statue that is singing it.

She comes closer to the statue, bends to look at its face. It’s white as chalk and seems completely lifeless, but its lips are moving, letting out words in a language unknown to Lucrecia.

“Jenova?” she asks uncertainly. “Is this you?”

The statue doesn’t react, but the grey mist outside the window swirls and moves, and gives way to another view.

It’s a cave filled with crystals of all sizes and shapes. _A very familiar cave,_ Lucrecia thinks.

“I know this place,” she says quietly. “It’s the Crystal Cave. I- I mean, me and Doctor Valentine- we’ve been there. That’s where we found Chaos. Why are you showing it to me?”

The view changes again.

It’s of Lucrecia hunched over a box with rare Materia pieces. There is a pulsing purple aura around her body. Lucrecia sees her image reaching into the box and taking a grey sphere – Protomateria. The aura pulses once, twice, and then fades out; the past-Lucrecia slumps forward, laying her head onto the table, Protomateria clasped tightly in her hand.

“I know, Protomateria blocks the Cetra-related abi- Oh. Not Cetra-related, right? It subdues the parasite. That’s what you wanted to tell me? But… I don’t have it anymore.”

The picture shifts back to the Crystal Cave.

“There is another Protomateria in the Cave? I can get it there?” Lucrecia asks, frowning at the picture.

The picture flickers briefly.

“But… I’m dead now, right?” Lucrecia asks. “I don’t need it anymore.”

The picture changes, and Lucrecia sees-

Simon kneeling on the wet stone path, looking with an expression of fascination at Lucrecia’s own body. Her head, as well as the ground around it, is covered in blood, but the wound, though still visible, is closing quickly.

“I’m… _regenerating_ again? I’m going to wake up _again_?”Lucrecia cries. “How is it even possible? How am I going to stop this _thing_?”

The picture changes back to the Crystal Cave.

“Oh. That’s what you were trying to tell me? I have to go there?”

The picture flickers out, replaced again by swirling grey mist. The song stops for a longer moment than usual; the room trembles, pieces of white chalk-stone falling off the walls and ceiling. The statue crumbles further; half of its face is gone now, as well as one of its arm. When the song starts again, it’s quieter than before, barely above a whisper.

Something flashes outside, and the mist disappears, leaving behind only darkness. Lucrecia looks out of the window.

The room seems to be floating above the black flower. The purple sphere inside the flower isn’t dim anymore; it flashes brightly, and the room trembles again. The song stops altogether. The statue crumbles into a fine white dust. The room shakes, walls and ceiling begin to fall apart-

Lucrecia finds herself in the darkness again. Before her, the snowflake blows up, leaving a cloud of glowing shards. One by one their glow is fading out and they blend into the dark.

The purple sphere glows again. Lucrecia feels a powerful force drawing her in. She tries in vain to escape, but it’s too strong.

Suddenly, black shapes appear in the darkness around the flower. As they shift closer, the purple light grows dimmer until it’s barely visible. Lucrecia feels a sense of – fear? apprehension? – coming from it. The pull grows weaker, and then disappears altogether.

Lucrecia uses it as her cue to get away. She focuses on the flickering orange light above and tries to move towards it. This time it works; before she knows it, the flower looks small and far away. She sees now that it’s surrounded by several giant bodies. Their outlines resemble dragons’. She doesn’t know what they are, but she has a feeling that they aren’t friends with the flower.

She focuses on the orange light again. It grows closer and closer, and looks slightly distorted as if she was looking at it through a thick crooked glass. It seems so close now that if she Lucrecia still had hands she could probably touch it, so she tries to do just that-

And then she’s floating above it.

Below her is a surface of a frozen sea. Large waves, forever stopped mid-motion, hang over a small fire. A human-shaped figure is sitting in front of the fire. The human’s white hair is covering his naked shoulders and back.

“Sephiroth?” Lucrecia calls.

The man looks up from the fire and searches the darkness with his gaze, but doesn’t seem to see her.

She tries to move closer, but something is keeping her at a distance. Sephiroth’s eyes return to the fire. She looks into it too.

It’s a burning town. Small, toy-like houses are consumed by fire, and tiny people are running around in panic. Sephiroth looks into the fire intently, unblinking. Lucrecia tries to call out to him again, but he doesn’t notice.

She is about to try and reach for him one more time when she feels herself flying upwards, towards the top of the crystal dome that covers the frozen sea. Up and up, faster and faster-

 

* * *

 

Lucrecia coughed, spitting out a mouthful of rainwater. Blinking her eyes open, she saw that the sky was still dark, and the rain was still going; she wondered idly how much time it took for her to regenerate this time. Slowly she sat up, and touched her head gingerly, wincing at the mess of dirt, blood, and tangled hair. She felt no pain; the wound had, most likely, already healed completely.

“Interesting,” Simon commented. She glanced at him. He was examining something behind her back, his brow furrowed in concentration. Lucrecia turned her head to look what he was so interested by.

She was met by a heap of white feathers. Some of them were streaked with dirt and blood, but they were nevertheless beautiful. Lucrecia squinted, trying to see where the feathers were coming from. It looked like there was a bird’s wing stuck to her back.

“Did I fall onto a bird?” she thought, frowning at the feathers. Trying to get a better look, she began to turn around and lost her balance for a moment. To steady herself, she leaned on her two arms… and felt her _third_ arm flailing.

The wing on her back flapped wildly, hitting Simon in the face.

Lucrecia jumped up in horror, spun on the spot, trying to see her own back. The wing folded itself, just as her arms, and was now tucked close to her body.

“What is this?” She asked in a panicked voice. “What did you do to me?”

Simon stood up from the ground. His trousers and shirt were soaked through and covered in dirt, his nose was bleeding, but he looked amused.

“I didn’t do anything. To be honest, this,” he gestured at the wing, “was the last thing I would expect to happen.”

“Then _what_ … _why_ …?”

“Oh, I have a theory or two,” Hojo said. “Let’s go inside, I’ll do tests-“

“No,” Lucrecia shook her head, remembering her last vision, “I have to go. Please, tell Sephiroth- Tell him that I’m sorry.”

“Wait,” Simon began, but she didn’t stop to listen.

The memory of another vision came back to her, the one where she was flying over the burning world. And, just as she did in that vision, she pushed the ground away with her two feet, – and found herself floating above the ground. Her wing flapped once, twice, until she learned how to stop it from doing that, – the wing wasn’t what held her up in the air.

She looked around; Simon was staring at her from below with narrowed eyes. A little farther away stood the Turk, – whom Lucrecia didn’t notice before, too busy panicking over her new appendage. She was holding a gun pointed at Lucrecia. The Mansion loomed behind the Turk, dark and silent. This time, its sight didn’t make Lucrecia feel the same strong pull to Sephiroth; she had a vague suspicion that it was somehow connected to the dark shapes that had scared the black flower and made its light dimmer.

Lucrecia shook her head, turning away from the house where she had been trapped for more than half a year (or half a century?), and pushed the ground farther away.

A few moments later she entered the clouds, and the damp, grey fog swallowed her.

 

* * *

 

Hojo observed Lucrecia’s flight with curiosity. The wing didn’t seem to have any function besides being an extra appendage (and a strong one, he thought, absently stroking his aching jaw). That meant that her ability to fly was magical in nature, – which was even more fascinating than strength and regeneration, although, he supposed, it shouldn’t have been such a surprise to him.

“Doctor Hojo,” the Turk, Natalya, said, “what was that?”

“A monster,” he answered.

“It looked like Doctor Crescent,” the Turk noted.

“Doctor Crescent is dead. I confirmed her death today at two-thirty one. That… definitely wasn’t _her_.”

“You ordered me to _not_ shoot it.”

“Yes, I’m planning on tracking it down later,” Hojo lied. “It would make an interesting research specimen.”

Natalya shifted in her place. “I need to report this to Headquarters.”

Hojo shrugged, and subsequently shivered at the cold. “Go ahead and start the report, I’ll join you later. Need to finish something here first.”

He continued to look at the clouds where Lucrecia had disappeared. Natalya’s footsteps began to retreat, but then stopped.

“What was the cause of doctor Crescent’s death?” she asked.

“Heavy postpartum hemorrhage,” Hojo said.

When the Turk had finally left him alone, Hojo crouched down, produced a small transparent plastic zip-lock bag and tweezers from his pocket and began to carefully pick up pieces of flesh and bone left after Lucrecia’s second suicide attempt.

He supposed that the data collected from those samples would be of great help to the Experiment.

“A parasite,” he muttered under his breath, while working. “Well, Lucrecia, you were never the brightest one. A _parasite_! No, this is not _just_ a parasite. This is so, so much more than that.”

 

* * *

 

The cloud cover ended over the Crystal Mountains. Lucrecia emerged from the thick fog and dived between two mountain peaks into the ancient crater. Inside the crater the air was clear and motionless, and the surface of the lake, smooth like a mirror, reflected the fading stars.

Lucrecia landed near the entrance to the Crystal Cave. Her hair and clothes were damp, washed clean by the rain while she was flying through clouds, and she was grateful for that.

Before entering the Cave, Lucrecia stopped and looked, one last time, at the lake and the mountains that surrounded it; she wasn’t sure if she would ever see the light of day again. For some time she stood, taking in the sight and the sounds of the awakening world.

When the eastern horizon brightened and the last stars began to disappear, she turned towards the cave and walked in.

Inside, she was momentarily overwhelmed by deafening silence. No sounds reached into the cave from outside. Gone were the voices that had been constantly whispering to her. Though she could still feel Sephiroth, he was nothing but a tiny, weak spot of warmth; instead of making her feel better, that just made her even lonelier.

Lucrecia walked deeper inside the cave and sat down on one of the broken stalagmites, hugging herself. Her wing had, at some point, disappeared, leaving no trace, no tear in her clothes, not even one feather. “Was it even there”, she wondered, “or was it just one more vision? No, Simon saw it too, must have been real.”

Sitting there in the silence, she thought about Ifalna and Professor Faremis returning to Nibelheim and finding out that she was gone and Vincent was somehow alive. What would Simon tell them? How would he explain Lucrecia’s disappearance? Would they look for her, would they guess where she had gone? Would they, someday, find her?

“Hopefully not”, she decided, and hugged herself tighter. However lonely she was feeling, it was the best solution.

She only hoped that Simon hadn't been right about Professor Faremis and that, when the Professor learned about the true nature of Type-2 cells, he would stop all branches of the Jenova Project and try to find a cure for its victims.

The crystals around Lucrecia were glimmering with gentle light. She closed her eyes and wished she could turn into one of those crystals… To sleep forever without waking up, to dream of the life she hadn’t had a chance of living anymore…

Unnoticed by her, a thin shimmering mist began to appear around her hunched form, slowly solidifying into a transparent crystal, and as it was materializing, Lucrecia slowly slipped into a dream.

She dreamt of a tiny green house on a small tropic island, of walks on the beach and in the jungle, of playing in the sand with Sephiroth.

She dreamt of Ifalna living nearby in a house of her own, of her garden where flowers were always blooming, and of her small daughter.

She dreamt of her son growing up surrounded by family, together with his best friends Angeal and Genesis.

She dreamt of Simon, and Vincent, and Gast, of all people she knew and loved, living there with them, of the days that were always sunny, and night skies with countless stars.

Sometimes, she thought, in those dreams appeared the real Sephiroth, but as the time flew, he was becoming less and less real, turning into a barely visible shadow silently observing his would-be life.

And while time was a current, Lucrecia was but a rock stuck at its bottom, unaffected and unchanged by its flow.


	14. Chapter 14

The cave where Lucrecia slept was isolated from the outside world. No sound disturbed its silence; no whisper from the Lifestream reached its crystal halls. Far from any inhabited place, surrounded by steep mountains, it was known only to a handful of people, and even fewer ever set foot near it. Years had gone by without Lucrecia noticing. In her happy little world, it was always the same sunny summer, and Sephiroth still was the same five year old boy he had been in the very beginning of her dream.

A couple of times Lucrecia had felt some kind of disturbance, as if someone had entered the cave and was roaming around, but that had only made her dive deeper into the dreams. The real world was for other people now, not for her, and she didn’t want to deal with them, or with it, ever again.

And as long as she could pretend that her small island was real, and the people that surrounded her were truly there, she was happy.

 

It was a warm summer night. Lucrecia was walking along the beach, enjoying light breeze and smiling at the starry-filled sky, when the ground under her feet shook violently. A moment later, a wave of pain hit her, as if she was stabbed through, and Lucrecia doubled over. The sky, the ground, the jungle, - all began to fall apart like a shattered mirror. She felt herself slipping, falling through the cracks… right onto the floor of the Crystal Cave, in a shower of crystal shards.

She sat up, gulping the cold air for the first time in years and coughing, and looked dubiously at quickly-fading cuts on her bloodied palms. Her stomach still hurt, but the pain was fading quickly. With shaking fingers she unbuttoned her red shirt and looked at the undamaged skin under it.

“What is happening?” she wondered aloud. “Am I going to die, after all?”

That wouldn’t be too bad, she supposed, although it would be sad to leave the dream world behind. Whatever was awaiting her after death, she doubted it would be the same. Certainly, none of the people from her dream would be there, not after everything she had done.

She wondered if they even still remembered her… Not very likely, she decided. Sephiroth must’ve had another woman to call his mother; she hadn’t seen him in the dream world for a while, so he must have forgotten her already and was happily living his real life with his real family. Simon had been so disappointed in her that, no doubt, he had tried to forget her as soon as she had run away. And Vincent… she was lucky if he didn’t curse her name every time he remembered her.

The pain in her stomach had faded completely, but the thoughts of people she had left behind made Lucrecia feel another kind of pain. She had been right; the real world wasn’t for her anymore. There was no one and nothing waiting for her in it but loneliness, guilt and pain.

“I need to go back into the dream,” she whispered. “If I’m going to die, let it happen there.”

She climbed to her feet and looked at the scattered pieces of crystal. Had she really been inside it? Had the crystal been what kept her asleep? And if so, how could she repair it? Closing her eyes and concentrating, she tried to recreate the thoughts and emotions she had had before she had slipped into the dream world for the first time. It seemed to be working; she cracked one eye open and saw a thin shimmering mist gathering around her.

The dream world appeared before her gradually, slowly emerging from grey mist, and gaining colors, and shape, and sense of reality. Lucrecia let out a breath of relief; she was finally home again.

“Mommy!” she heard, and turned around, to see Sephiroth who was running up the hill, knee-deep in green grass. “Mommy, you’re back! I missed you!”

He hugged her tightly around her middle, and she hugged him back.

“I know,” she said, “I missed you too, honey.”

A rumble of thunder sounded from somewhere over the sea, and Lucrecia frowned, - thunderstorms weren’t something that had ever happened here. She looked over to the shore–

On a small stripe of rocky ground between the meadow and the beach stood a tall man. Wind played with his long white hair and flapped his black coat. His bright blue-green eyes were trained on Lucrecia, unblinking.

Lucrecia stared in return, unsure of what to do. That was _her_ dream, but she was fairly sure that she hadn’t dreamt _him_.

The man made an aborted motion, as if he had wanted to go to her but changed his mind. His gaze went to Sephiroth for a moment, then back to Lucrecia. A moment later he shook his head, turned away, and began to walk. With every step he was becoming more and more ghost-like; through his fading form, the sea and the sand were visible. Soon he disappeared completely. With him, the storm clouds went away too, and the sky became clear again.

“Who was that scary man?” Sephiroth asked, still clinging to her.

Lucrecia hesitated. “I… I don’t know…”

But she knew. She hadn’t recognized the man right away, but- but it had been _him_. The real Sephiroth.

“How much time had passed?” she thought. “He looked twenty at the very least. How many years had I slept?”

But it didn’t matter, she reminded herself. Whatever was happening in the real world, it didn’t concern her anymore. The real Sephiroth lived his own real life, with his own real family… He didn’t need her anymore. He had never needed her at all.

“Let’s go home,” she told the boy beside her, and, hand in hand, they walked towards her small house.

 

Half way to the house, Sephiroth spotted Angeal and Genesis and ran off to them. Lucrecia smiled at the boys, waved at Gillian who was with them, and continued to walk.

She was about to open the door to her garden when the ground began to quake again. She looked back at Gillian and the boys; they were still talking and laughing as if nothing unusual was happening. Lucrecia started walking back to them, but as soon as she made the first step, she was overwhelmed by a feeling of vertigo. She fell to her knees and grabbed at the grass to steady herself, but it didn’t help. A moment later came the pain, the kind she had never experienced before; it felt like she was burning alive. She tried to scream but found out that her voice was gone. The dream around her was falling apart, but she barely saw that. Another wave of pain, and the ground under her was gone, and she was falling down again.

 

She came to on the stone floor of the Crystal Cave. Everything was quiet. It felt like some time had passed since she blacked out; her cuts had already healed. She sat up and looked herself over, finding no trace of whatever had happened to her in the dream. She had been absolutely sure that she had been dying, but, for some reason, she was still alive.

She was alive, but something was wrong. That weak spot of warmth that had always been with her, her connection to Sephiroth, was gone.

She tried to reassure herself. “It doesn’t mean anything. He must have simply decided that he didn’t want this connection anymore. Or, probably, Professor Faremis and Simon finally found a way to remove the parasite… Yes! That must be it, – they cured him, that’s why the link disappeared. And that’s why he came to my dream, – to say goodbye, because he knew we wouldn’t be connected anymore!”

Still, she couldn’t stop herself from walking to the cave entrance. She hovered uncertainly before it for while, squinting at the light of day, but then rolled her eyes and stepped outside.

The voices met her, whispering all around, as if she had never been away from them. The link she had been sharing with Sephiroth, however, was still missing.

“Lost,” the voices whispered inside her head, “lost, lost forever, Sephiroth!”

“Gone,” they cried, “gone, gone, lost, gone.”

 “What?” she asked the voices. “What happened to him?”

“Into the darkness he fell,” they wailed, “and it consumed him.”

“No hope,” they whispered, “lost forever, no hope, no hope.”

“It can’t be,” she muttered. “It’s impossible! He… he can’t be dead!”

“Dead,” the voices went on, “gone, lost, carried away.”

“Can’t you tell me what exactly happened?” she shouted angrily, but the voices only continued to cry and wail.

Lucrecia looked around, trying to decide where to go. The grass was green, and sun stood high up in the sky, but the leaves on small bushes along the lake shore were yellow; it seemed to be an autumn, although she still had no idea what year it was. She turned northwest and pushed the ground away.

 

Unwilling to attract any attention to herself, she landed in a forest at a distance from Nibelheim and took off her white lab coat, folding it up and wincing at her ridiculous clothes. The rest of the way she walked along a country road that didn’t seem to be used often.

The road led her to the top of a hill just out of Nibelheim, and there she stopped, surprised and disturbed by the sight that opened to her.

The town seemed to be completely destroyed. Among the black debris scurried people in yellow jumpsuits. The Mansion, at least, seemed to be intact, still standing in its usual place on the mountain slope. On a cleared-out part of the main street stood a van with Shin-Ra logo on its side. That decided it; Lucrecia didn’t want to come in contact with anyone from Shin-Ra yet. She quietly slipped back into the forest and backtracked to the point where she had landed.

From there she flew farther northwest to another small town, a little more than a village, called Sieben Kiefern. As before, she landed in a forest and made the rest of her way on foot.

To her surprise, Sieben Kiefern wasn’t so small anymore. New streets sprouted from it, and at the farthest end of the town a large tower was standing, slanted to the side a little. Something about that tower seemed unusual-

“It’s a rocket!” Lucrecia blurted out, staring wide-eyed at it.

“Huh?” a passerby, an old man with a basket full of mushrooms, huffed. “Of course it’s a rocket! What backwater village are you from, girl? The town even got a new name for it!”

“Oh,” Lucrecia said, “and what is the town called now?”

“ _Rocket_ town!” the man said proudly, puffing out his chest. “Well, this one,” he pointed at the rocket, “didn’t make it because of one dumbass… But we launched a bunch of them in these past years! Satellites and such.”

“No humans?” Lucrecia asked, genuinely curious.

“No,” the man said. “This rocket was the first capable of manned flight into outer space… But as I said, one dumbass ruined everything.”

 

She walked with the man towards the town, listening to him rambling on about rockets, and the town, and Shin-Ra, and war with Wutai, and cuts to the funding of space exploration programs… Lucrecia didn’t even need to ask questions; nodding and humming was more than enough.

She was still trying to figure out how to ask about Sephiroth when the man said, “You know, Shin-Ra’s in a bit of turmoil right now, what with SOLDIER Firsts dying and all. Even Sephiroth, who would’ve thought, eh? Not me, that’s for sure! The guy was practically invincible. Monsters got him, they say. Ha! Monsters! I’d say,” he leaned in to Lucrecia and whispered conspiratorially, “Shin-Ra themselves disposed of him! They only needed him for the war, as a weapon, and when war ended? They got scared of him! What if he turned against them? He would’ve killed them all, Turks or no Turks!”

“Sephiroth died?” Lucrecia asked incredulously, unwilling to trust her ears. “Are you sure?”

“Oh yes I am. If you’re interested in what the _official_ version says,” the man smirked at her, “go to the inn, they got newspapers.”

She followed the man to the town square where he showed her the inn and bid farewell.

The inn was empty save for a young man sitting behind the counter at the bar, half-hidden behind a newspaper. Its title page was turned towards Lucrecia; in big black letters, above a black-and-white picture of the same man that had visited Lucrecia’s dream island, was written:

**“Hero of Wutai War dies: Another loss for Shin-Ra”**

The date on the newspaper was 18th of October, the year 0002. She had been asleep for twenty-two years.

“Impossible,” Lucrecia muttered. “I don’t believe it.”

“What?” The barman asked, lowering the paper and revealing a young round face with blue eyes and a smatter of freckles around the nose. “Ah! Sephiroth’s death? Unbelievable, right?”

“Yes, it is. Oh, can I read this?” Lucrecia asked quickly. “I just… want to make sure it’s not some kind of a joke.”

“Sure. Here, I have a spare,” the boy said and gave her another newspaper, pulling it from under the counter.

Lucrecia perched on one of the bar stools and began to read.

The article didn’t only tell about the circumstances of Sephiroth’s death (of which it told surprisingly little), but of his life, too. Lucrecia learned that Sephiroth had trained to be a SOLDIER (a special forces of some kind, as far as she understood) since early childhood. He had gone to Wutai War at only twelve years old (that made her bristle) and soon had become a hero. They had even called him Demon of Wutai.

What the author had completely omitted was any information about Sephiroth’s family. There wasn’t even a photo of him with his father. It looked like he hadn’t had anyone close to him, except for two other young men that were beside him in some of the pictures.

Their names were Angeal and Genesis. Both were listed as recently deceased.

For a long time Lucrecia sat there, rereading the article over and over again, unable to reconcile reality of Sephiroth’s life with the image she had made up in her mind. She just couldn’t understand how and why it all had happened. How had Professor Gast allowed that? Where had Ifalna been? What Simon had been thinking?

“I asked you to take care of him, Simon,” she muttered. “That was the only thing I asked of you. Oh, Sephiroth, I’m so sorry…”

The barman glanced over the paper at her. “What? Take care of who? Sephiroth? You were his girlfriend or something? Wow!”

“No,” she chuckled mirthlessly. “I was his mother… if I can be called that, which I doubt.”

“Huh? His _mother_? Sure, and I’m Bahamut!” the boy laughed, clearly not believing her.

She only shook her head at that, returning her gaze to the paper.

 

On the way back to the Crystal Cave Lucrecia contemplated going to Midgar to demand answers from Gast and Simon. She was absolutely furious with them for making Sephiroth’s life what it had been, for making him into the weapon she had been afraid he would become. But in the end, she decided against it. What was the point in confrontation with them when it was too late to change anything? As strong as her anger towards them was, it didn’t even come close to her hatred of herself; it was her own fault, first and foremost, that Sephiroth’s life had gone the wrong way. Had she not agreed to participate in the Project, she would have had the life she now could only dream about, with her son by her side.

But now Sephiroth was dead, and so was her last connection to the world.

Back in the cave, she returned to her place and slipped back into the dream world where Sephiroth was alive and well, a happy small boy enjoying his carefree life.

The crystal solidified around her again, effectively cutting her off from the real world.

 

* * *

 

The life on the small island went on. Between playing with Sephiroth, walks on the beach with Iffie, and dinner dates with Vincent (and sometimes Simon) Lucrecia had begun to forget what had happened in reality. She still remembered most of the events, but wasn’t so sure about people; had real Simon been so affectionate with her, or not? Had real Vincent known the details of Lucrecia’s life they were talking about? Had Iffie ever been as interested in Materia as Lucrecia herself?

She couldn’t remember, and, she supposed, it didn’t matter.

 

One day, in the middle of a conversation with Iffie about correlations between the usage of Materia and certain changes in brain activity, Lucrecia heard a strange noise. She fell silent and strained her ears, looking around in an attempt to find its source.

“Hey, are you listening?” Iffie asked with a laugh, noticing her lack of attention.

“Shh, I think I heard something weird.”

“Huh.” Iffie put her palm to her ear like a hearing tube and spun in place. “I don’t hear anything,” she said after a moment.

Lucrecia, however, was sure that the sound was there. As she listened, it was becoming gradually louder, - a distant voice, singing, “Sephiroth, Sephiroth.”

“Sephiroth,” she whispered. “Does it mean?..”

“Sephiroth?” Ifalna asked, frowning at her in confusion. “He’s playing outside with the boys, remember?”

“Ah… yes, yes,” Lucrecia nodded absently. The song was growing louder with every minute; now she could hear other voices as well.

“Sephiroth, Sephiroth,” they sang, “our god, our hope, our salvation.”

“Mother of Gods,” they sang, “Your son is here, your son is with us, o Mother.”

Lucrecia was dimly aware of Iffie saying something to her, but the dream world was quickly losing its colors, becoming flat and grey, so focused she was on the voices. They were silent for years, even while Sephiroth had been alive, - why had they awakened _now_?

Was her son _not_ dead?

Lucrecia looked at the fading shadows of her dream, trying to understand how to wake up. She had never had to, before; it had always been something from outside that pulled her back into reality. This time she had no such luck.

Shutting her eyes tightly, she concentrated on the feeling of the cave as she remembered it, – cold still air, gentle light coming from the crystals, the absolute silence, – but as the voices continued to sing (“Sephiroth, Sephiroth!”), instead of the Cave another place appeared before her eyes. She saw her own room in the Shinra Mansion, saw it so clearly that it almost became real.

“No, no, not _there_ ,” she whispered, “wake up, wake up, WAKE UP-”

 

She opened her eyes. She was lying on a wooden floor of a small round room. Along its wall went a low wooden shelf with multiple flower pots sitting on it and on the floor beside, some with flowers and greens, others only filled with soil. The sun setting in heavy clouds was filling the room with red light through the large and wide window.

She stood up slowly, using the shelf as a support, and turned around to look at the room. On the wall opposite to the window was a simple wooden door. Opening it, she peeked out into a long dim hall. On both sides there were doors; the one on the left side was opened a fraction. She pushed it and stepped cautiously inside.

The room looked like someone’s study; to the right of her stood a large bookcase, followed by a large strongbox with several books stacked on its top. On the left, under a window, there was a table with a chair.

And under the table, a small child was sitting, curled in a ball, his face hidden in his knees, his hands hugging his knees tightly. His hair was very light-colored, maybe even white.

She crouched down before the table. “Hey. What are you doing here?”

The boy lifted his head a little, glanced at her through his bangs. “I’m hiding.”

“Oh.” She thought for a moment, then climbed under the table and sat down cross-legged on the floor beside the boy. He side-eyed her cautiously, but said nothing.

Silence fell. She looked at the bright red squares cast by setting sun on the walls and the floor. They didn’t seem to be moving, even after a few minutes.

“Who are you hiding from?” she asked finally.

“Doctor Hojo. I don’t like him,” the boy said, scowling. “He says that Professor Gast is never coming back.”

She furrowed her brows at that. The names seemed familiar. “I think I maybe knew them,” she said.

“Hm.” The boy squinted at her suspiciously. “I don’t know _you_. Are you a Turk? What is your name?”

She thought for a moment. _What was her name? Something starting with an L?_

“L…Lucy,” she said at last.

 “No, I really don’t know you,” the boy said with confidence. “You must be new here.”

“Maybe,” she said. “So, why are you hiding?”

“Because Hojo wants to take me to Midgar.” The boy straightened his spine, looking warily towards the door. “But I don’t want to go. I’ll wait here until Professor Gast comes back. He _promised_.”

“He’s never coming back. Hojo killed him,” another voice said. Lucy started and looked quickly around, but saw no one else.

“I know,” the boy said softly to his knees. “But maybe if I wait just a little longer, he will come back to me. I really, really miss him.”

“Whose voice was that?” Lucy asked quietly, leaning close to the boy’s ear.

The boy shrugged. “Mine.”

“Yours?”

“Yes. It was the other me talking. He’s older, he knows things. He says I shouldn’t trust people, and shouldn’t get attached to them. Because, even if they say that they love you, even if they say they’re your friends, they’ll leave anyway.” The boy sighed. “I don’t believe him. He talks like Hojo.”

A shadow fell across the room, and red sunbeams disappeared. Darkness enveloped them. Something roamed there, outside, something with heavy steps that made all room shake. Lucy instinctively searched for the boy’s hand and took it, clasping tightly, –  though if it was more for his sake or for herself, she didn’t know. A few moments later, the shadow moved away, and the room again filled with ominous red light.

“What was _that_?” Lucy whispered to the boy.

The boy whispered back, “The monster. You should probably go.”

“What? There are monsters here?”

“Only one,” he said, and, hiding his face in his knees again, quietly added, “Me.”

“You… are a monster?”

“Not _now_ -me. _That_ me is the very latest. He doesn’t like this,” the boy lifted his head and nodded at the room, “so he wants to destroy it. I think,” he added thoughtfully, “he doesn’t want to remember feeling lonely. Maybe he thinks that if he forgets, then he won’t feel like this anymore?”

“I don’t know,” Lucy said. “But you’re right. We should get out of here before the monster comes back.”

The boy shook his head. “You go. I can’t.”

“Why?”

“Because this is just a memory,” another, older, voice said. “Which he is a part of. And _you_ don’t belong here.”

 

This time, when Lucrecia opened her eyes, she was met with the familiar sight of myriads of glowing crystals. She had finally woken up, but what had happened before that? She remembered the room with red sunset and the small boy hiding under a table, and… had he said that Professor Gast was dead, killed by Hojo? No, that was said by the other, the older one. The little one said…

_“Maybe if I wait a little longer, he will come back to me.”_

“Oh, Sephiroth,” she whispered.

_“I think he doesn’t want to remember feeling lonely. Maybe he thinks that if he forgets it, then he won’t feel it again?”_

 “I’m so, so sorry,” she cried into the silence of the cave. “If I only knew…”

She trailed off, crying wordlessly over the lonely child who was still, years and years later (how old was he in the memory, she wondered, four years? Five?), waiting for someone who was never going to come back.


	15. Chapter 15

For a long time after her return from Sephiroth’s childhood memory Lucrecia knelt unmoving on the hard stone floor of the Crystal Cave, in front of the remains of her broken crystal. Her tears had, after a while, dried; after the initial outburst, she slipped into a stupor.

The crystals around her shimmered with gentle light. Lucrecia blinked owlishly at them without really seeing. The voices whispered and sang quietly, praising Sephiroth and the Mother. The Mother that wasn’t Lucrecia.

For so long Lucrecia had tried to convince herself that she had done everything in her power to undo at least a small part of harm she had done to Sephiroth… She had been, and still was, absolutely certain that her running away and _staying away_ was the right thing to do. But it appeared that even in doing that she had managed to add more to her child’s suffering. Too caught up in her own pain, in her fear and disgust of herself, too focused on protecting Sephiroth from herself, she had never made sure that he was safe _without_ her. She had simply hoped that Professor Gast and Ifalna would somehow make everything right without her doing anything to help them… That they would somehow _know_ all the things she had learned through the visions.

But the worst thing was how greatly she had underestimated Hojo. Never would she have thought he would kill the Professor… But he had.

“I should have stayed.” She closed her eyes for a moment, feeling a lone tear making its way across her cheek. “I should have waited for the Professor and Iffie to come back. I should have told them everything, and only then left. I should have never trusted Simon in the first place. How was I so careless? Did he even tell them what I found out about Jenova’s cells? No, I doubt it. Iffie would’ve tried to stop them both if they knew and still went on.”

Iffie… what had happened to her? Had she tried to object to Hojo’s decisions, – as, Lucrecia supposed, Professor Gast had… and Vincent before him… Was she also dead?

“No,” she whispered, “please, this can’t be true… He couldn’t have killed her, too…”

And… Vincent…

“Oh, Vincent!” she murmured. A sudden wave of dread hit her like a gust of cold wind. “If Simon made Sephiroth’s life into that… what did he do to Vincent?”

As in on cue, she heard a sound of multiple soft footsteps behind her and, a moment later, a familiar voice called softly, “Lucrecia?”

 

Lucrecia scrambled to her feet and turned towards the intruders, her eyes darting between them in search for Vincent. But the first familiar face she had noticed wasn’t his. It was a fire lion who, she was almost certain, was Nanaki of Cosmo Canyon. His eyes were narrowed and his posture defensive; it didn’t look like he recognized her, – which wasn’t a surprise, given that the last of the few times they have met was more than twenty years ago, and back then he had been just a cub, and Lucrecia hadn’t been infected with Jenova’s cells.

She moved her focus away from probably-Nanaki onto the other people in the group, and nearly missed Vincent at first. It was hard to recognize him in his new outfit; gone was the dark blue Turk suit, replaced by a strange, almost medieval costume with a long red cloak and metal-toe boots. A few strands of his long hair, – far longer than she remembered, – had escaped from under his red bandana, obscuring the sides of too-pale face. His left, Chaos-tainted arm was encased in a shining metal gauntlet.

“Vincent?” she whispered, disbelieving her own eyes. Was he really there, or was it just another vision?

“Lucrecia!” he dashed towards her, his eyes wide and hopeful, as if seeing her was an unexpected joy.

The parasite inside her reacted to his movement; Lucrecia felt a sudden curiosity that wasn’t hers, – _interesting creature_ , – an impulse to _catch-dissect-see what it’s made of_ … She recoiled from Vincent, putting a hand up in a gesture of warning. “No! Stay back!”

He stopped immediately, freezing in place, his face changing from an excited and hopeful expression into a sad, dejected look. The others in the group of strangers visibly pricked up, exchanging a few short phrases, too quiet for her to hear; their gazes shifted nervously between Lucrecia and Vincent.

“Don’t,” she said quickly. “Don’t come closer. It’s- It’s dangerous.”

He nodded. “I- I’m sorry.”

“It’s- It’s okay.” She backed off and knelt down in front of her broken crystal, hoping that it would help to calm the _thing_ down. It worked; the relentless pulse of _creature-catch-see what it’s made of_ quieted to an almost imperceptible whisper in the back of her mind.

“Lucrecia,” Vincent started after a moment, bringing her back to reality. “Is this really you?”

She nodded without looking at him.

“You’re alive…” he said in a soft, almost reverent tone, as if her being alive was some kind of a miracle, as if he considered it something _good_. It was very confusing. Why wasn’t he throwing curses at her, why wasn’t he telling her all the things he had surely waited so many years to tell, – about her turning him into a monster, about her ruining his life?

“I didn’t want to be alive,” she admitted, shutting her eyes. “After… everything… I just couldn’t take it. I wanted to disappear. And I- I tried to- to end it all, I _tried_ , Vincent, but… Jenova’s cells didn’t let me die.”

She shook her head, remembering her desperate attempts to end her life. Vincent was silent behind her back.

“So I ran away instead… I wanted to sleep without ever waking up again,” she murmured, “and I did, for so long… and I dreamt… I dreamt about Sephiroth. For so long, I dreamt about him… I still do… My… child… I never-“ her voice broke; she had to swallow and  take a few breaths before she could continue. “I never even had… never had a chance to hold him. Not even once since he was born. How can I be called his mother, Vincent? I left him, left him all alone with- to-“

She had to stop again, swallowing her tears.

“That was my greatest mistake,” she whispered. “My biggest sin. I never should have agreed…”

She heard Vincent making a step towards her. The parasite reacted immediately; she whipped around, shouting, “Back! Stay back!”

His face contorted in a grimace of pain as he backed off, his gaze falling away from her and focusing on the floor. He looked so unhappy, and Lucrecia still couldn’t understand why. How could he, after everything that had happened, feel anything but hatred towards her? He had lived all those years in the real world, not in a sweet fantasy. He’d seen for himself what her decisions (her _mistakes_ ) had done to Professor Gast, to Ifalna, to Sephiroth-

Sephiroth. Vincent probably knew something about him coming back to life…

“Vincent,” she began cautiously. “Could you please tell me?”

He perked up instantly, looking at her with such hope that she had to look away, unable to hold his gaze. “…What?”

“Is Sephiroth alive? A few years ago, I heard that he died, but… I saw him in a-“ she hesitated, unsure how to explain. “In my dreams,” she said finally. “It looked like he was real… And I know that he’s even less likely to die easily than I am… Please, tell me, do you know anything?”

Vincent’s eyes shifted away from her; he seemed to be mulling over something. A spiky-haired young man from his group took a tentative step forward, but Vincent raised his right hand, and the man stopped, looking warily at Lucrecia.

“Lucrecia,” Vincent visibly braced himself for her reaction, and she cringed inwardly, – he shouldn’t have cared about her feelings, she wasn’t worth his worry. “Sephiroth is dead.”

“Oh.” She wasn’t surprised by his answer, not really; it was very likely that even if Sephiroth had come back from dead, it simply wasn’t a common knowledge yet. However, she had a suspicion that Vincent _knew_ but didn’t want to tell her. “I-“

“I’m sorry,” Vincent said. “I wish I could tell you something different.”

“It’s… alright.” She smiled at him sadly, and he made a short motion as if he wanted to take a step towards her again; she held up her hand, and he stayed in place.

“Hate to interrupt,” another from Vincent’s group, a tall blond man with safety goggles perched on his forehead and a cigarette clinging to his lower lip, said gruffly, “but we kinda in a hurry here. Vince, you coming?”

“I- yes, of course.” Vincent gave her one last wistful glance and turned away, following the others towards the entrance.

After just a few steps, he stopped and looked at her over his shoulder. “Lucrecia-“

“You should go,” she said quietly. “Your friends are waiting. And don’t- don’t come back. Please. Don’t waste your time on me.”

Vincent stared at her for a long while, until someone peeked into the cave and shouted for him; then he turned away and went out of the cave without looking back.

 

Vincent’s words about Sephiroth, or rather his hesitation before he had said them, made Lucrecia restless. He clearly knew something, but had chosen to stay silent; that could only mean one thing. Sehiroth wasn’t dead anymore, - or, probably, he never had been. He was _worse_ than dead… And Lucrecia was afraid that she knew exactly what _that_ meant.

 

_A dark figure darting through night and fire, leaving behind a trail of dead bodies._

_A young woman praying on a small round platform, with her eyes closed and her head bowed. A shadow descending from the darkness above, raising a sword to strike._

_A huge stone, bigger than a mountain, falling towards the ground, towards a man standing on the snow-covered cliff, his hands outstretched towards the sky._

_The planet, cracking open, spilling the green Mako._

_The man, laughing triumphantly._

_A shadow behind him - a woman in black, purple eyes glowing, silver hair shifting restlessly, sharp teeth bared._

_"And so the mighty God Sephiroth felled the old Goddess Gaia…”_

 

“I need to find him,” she whispered into the silence. “I have to talk to him. Maybe he isn’t completely gone yet… Maybe he will listen.”

 

Outside the cave and out of the dampening field emitted by the crystals, she was overwhelmed by the voices. The connection to Sephiroth that had once been a small warm dot at the very edge of her mind now was bright as the sun, its warmth seemingly coming from all directions at once. Lucrecia was still able to distinctly feel the pull towards Northern Crater, – where, she supposed, the largest mass of the parasitic cells was located. Unlike her time at the Mansion, this time the _thing’s_ focus wasn’t on her. She wasn’t drawn towards the north as strongly; it felt more like a suggestion than an order, and she was easily able to ignore it.

The sky was bright and blue, but in the middle of it, bigger than the sun itself, hovered a large red moon surrounded by flames.

“It’s already begun,” she thought, looking at the sky. “He’s already called it – the Meteor… I must find him, soon.”

 

Her first destination was, unsurprisingly, Nibelheim; it was the place where everything had begun for her, and she had hoped to find some clues there. Yes, the town had been destroyed in some kind of a catastrophe, but Shin-Ra Mansion had still been around when she had last been there.

On the way there she avoided people, flying as high above the ground as she dared, and landing as close to the Mansion as she could. The _thing_ that lived under her skin, the ancient Cetra’s Plague, was more alive and awake than ever, and she wasn’t sure how it would react to the proximity of living creatures. What if she felt the same urge again as with Vincent? She didn’t want to kill anyone, even less to infect them.

 

The Mansion was deserted; it was evident that no one lived in it for years. It bore the traces of a recent visit, – footprints visible in a thick layer of dust covering the floor, grooves left by the doors opening, – but whoever had been there was already gone. Nothing disturbed the silence except for Lucrecia’s own footsteps when she climbed the old creaky staircase and walked through the passage that led towards the entrance to the underground lab.

Inside the lab she was met by a complete chaos. Most of the light bulbs weren’t working, and the ones that did flickered and sputtered. Books and papers were strewn around and covered in dust; one of the Mako tanks was broken, shards of glass scattered on the ground beside it. She followed a narrow tunnel to the library, only to find out that it wasn’t in any better state. Its floor was littered with books; a number of journals spilled all over the table. She took one of the dusty journals and opened it, finding out that it was a collection of reports on Project S written after her flight from the Mansion.

The entirety of the journal was written in Professor Gast’s script; the records covered Sephiroth’s first year of life. Finishing it, she opened another one, and then another… until she finished all of them.

Lucrecia had been right. Professor Faremis had tried to postpone the enhancement as long as he had been able, and Ifalna, at least at first, had been helping him to look after Sephiroth. Her name ceased to appear in the journals on Sephiroth’s fourth year; that was the last of the journals written by Gast. The final pages were filled with his doubts and suspicions about the nature of Jenova… but the very last entry was cut short mid-sentence. Something had made the Professor give up on writing…

“Or _someone_ shot and killed him,” Lucrecia thought bitterly.

Taking over the Project, Hojo had immediately begun the enhancement process, writing detailed reports on Sephiroth’s quick progress. He seemed to have been completely fascinated by _“Specimen S”_ … had even tried to infect other “specimens” with Type-2 cells extracted from Sephiroth. Lucrecia strongly suspected that, unlike her and the other participants of early Jenova Experiments, those people had not volunteered for that.

Reading the journals, turning their dusty pages and looking at the faded ink on yellowed paper, Lucrecia sometimes got the feeling that she had already seen that; as if her hands remembered turning those same pages, and her eyes remembered seeing those same words. She frowned at the feeling, trying to find out where it was coming from-

“It’s Sephiroth,” she understood suddenly. “He was here… he’s read these journals… it made him bitter and angry and very hurt… But it was a long time ago. Far longer than I was awake this time. Maybe it had happened even before I woke up the _last_ time.”

 

The journals had not given her any clue to Sephiroth’s whereabouts, but the feeling of connection to him gave her an idea of a way to contact him without knowing his physical location. She had been able to enter his memory, and he had been able to enter her dreams; it seemed that their connection was a perfectly good way of communication… if she only knew how to use it.

She lowered herself down onto the dusty seat of old Gast’s chair, closed her eyes and concentrated on the feeling of Sephiroth’s last memory, trying to recreate it.

 

For a long time, she was only seeing the darkness behind her closed eyelids; when she was almost ready to give up, the darkness began to lift, giving way to a bright orange light.

She was standing in the middle of a very strange bridge, – wide, with no barriers at the sides. Its central part was bulging up, as if wasn’t a bridge, but a huge pipe. Before her stretched an endless calm sea, glimmering under the setting sun. Fluffy white clouds were scattered all over the clear blue sky. Everything was quiet; no wind disturbed the still air, no birds chirped, and no voices reached her. Even the ever-present whispers inside her head had faded into silence.

Looking around, Lucrecia first spotted two young men at the closest end of the bridge. One of them, a redhead in a long red coat, was sitting upon a stack of boxes with a book in his hands and seemed to be reading. Another, a bulky man in black with dark hair and a handle of a huge sword peeking out from behind his shoulder, was standing beside, arms crossed over his chest. He was looking, it seemed, straight at her. Sephiroth was nowhere to be seen.

She made a cautious step towards the men. They did not react. Lucrecia opened her mouth to call out to them… and noticed that they were completely frozen in place. Looking more closely at her surroundings, she found out that nothing in this place moved.  Even the sea waves were still. The redhead’s mouth was half-opened, as if he was in the middle of saying something; his left hand hovered over a half-turned page.

“Who are you? What are you doing here?”

She turned around. Behind her stood Sephiroth; this version of him seemed to be far older than the one from the Shin-Ra Mansion, but younger than the one that had visited Lucrecia’s own dream.

“I-“

“Ah, I see,” Sephiroth said. “You’re Lucy. I remember you. How did you get here?”

“I reached you through our connection,” Lucrecia began. “Is- is this another of your memories?”

“Yes.” Sephiroth smiled, blinking lazily, like a cat, at the shining sun. “A great view, isn’t it? I always liked this place.”

“Where are we?”

“Junon,” he said. “Sister Ray.”

“Junon?” Lucrecia frowned, trying to remember the name. “But it’s… just a village. Where does this bridge go?”

“A _bridge_? It’s a cannon, Lucy.”

“A _cannon_?” She gasped in awe. If this was truly a cannon, it must have been the largest one in the whole world. She couldn’t even imagine how and when (and _why_ ) it had been built.

Sephiroth smiled at her, clearly enjoying her bewilderment. “Well, this isn’t the cannon itself, just a hologram of it. _A memory_ of a hologram of it.” He chuckled, and added in a quieter voice, “This was the last time I was happy… I think.”

_His last happy memory_. Lucrecia’s joy at finally having her son beside her, even if in a dream world (or a memory-world), faded away.

“I’m-“ she stuttered, unsure how to say what she needed to say. “I’m sorry, I didn’t remember myself the first time we met. I’m Lucrecia Crescent… your mother.”

“What?” He glanced at her, frowning. “No, you’re mistaken. My mother’s name was Jenova. I heard she died soon after I was born.”

“Was that what Simon told you?” Lucrecia asked bitterly. “He was lying. _I’m_ your mother.”

“No, no,” insisted Sephiroth, backing away from her slightly. “I know for sure- my mother wasn’t human. I think one of my future selves found her. I’m not a normal human, either. I’m _different_. I’ve always known that.”

“No! You’re wrong, Sephiroth!” Lucrecia exclaimed. “You’re human, just like I am! We’re just- just _infected_! Maybe the cure can be found- just come with me-”

A deep rumble rolled over the peaceful scene. For a moment the sky grew black with a blood-red Meteor in place of sun; a moment later, it went back to normal, and Lucrecia heard a sound of wings flapping. Turning around, she saw that the two men were gone from their place at the end of the bridge; far above, barely visible against the sunlit sky, two tiny winged shapes were moving quickly away, towards the black wall of storm clouds that was quickly growing on the horizon.

“What have you done!” roared Sephiroth. “You ruined everything! Now they’re gone… and the _monster_ found this place!”

“The monster?”

“Yes,” Sephiroth said tiredly, hanging his head and sitting down heavily on the warm metal of the cannon. “He is destroying everything, every memory, every version of us. This place is so quiet. I stopped the time and kept quiet… I hoped that he would never find it… and then _you_ came here and ruined it all.”

“Sephiroth-“

“Get out,” he muttered. “You’ve done enough harm.”

“Wait!” Lucrecia said. “Please, tell me where you- where _he_ is now. If I talk to him… maybe he will stop.”

“I don’t think so. Don’t you understand? He’s erasing everything that connects him to humans. This- My friends- I loved them. He wants to forget how it felt.”

“Please-“

“Fine,” he said. “He is in the place where it all began. _She_ led him there.”

“ _She_?”

“Our true Mother. Jenova. Now _get out!_ ”

 

Lucrecia found herself looking at the flickering yellow lamp on the ceiling of the underground library. She was thrown out of the memory so abruptly that the sound of Sephiroth voice was still ringing in her ears.

_“Get out! You ruined everything!”_

_He wasn’t wrong_ , Lucrecia thought sadly. But maybe, just maybe she still had a chance of making it right.

 

_The place where it all began_ was, as she had easily guessed, the Northern Crater, where the Plague originated from and from where it had first spread. On the way there Lucrecia stopped by the Crystal Cave to give herself a short reprieve from the constant whispers. To her disappointment, she found out that the voices weren’t too quiet even inside the Cave anymore.

The Cave seemed a little different. Near the broken shards of her crystal she discovered a few dusty footprints that didn’t belong to her. Someone had come and gone while she had been away, and from the feel of it, it had been Vincent. Despite her parting words, he had come back.

Lucrecia shook her head. It didn’t matter right now; what mattered was reaching Sephiroth as soon as possible. She let herself have another short minute of relative quietness, and left the Crystal Cave.


End file.
